Florida Power & Light Co. has allegedly failed to properly maintain its Turkey Point nuclear plant's on-site emergency response facility, resulting in apparent violations, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said today.

The issue is considered of low to moderate safety significance, the NRC said.

The NRC staff has scheduled a meeting with FPL officials for a week from today at the NRC's Region II office in Atlanta to discuss the matter.

Specifically, on two different occasions in 2010 and 2011, plant workers disabled portions of the plant's Technical Support Center ventilation system, which would have left the facility unusable during an emergency, the NRC said.

FPL also failed to inform the NRC that the Technical Support Center was inoperable, an apparent violation of NRC requirements. That violation is being evaluated using the NRC's traditional enforcement process and could result in a civil penalty.

Peter Robbins, a nuclear spokesman for FPL's parent company, NextEra Energy, said, "The main thing for us is that this is a preliminary assessment. This is not the commission's final determination. They want to meet with us and discuss it. It important for people to know this issue never presented a risk to the health and safety of the public."

Robbins said the company disagrees that the facility was ever unusable and thus maintains it did not have to report the maintenance that was being performed.

The TSC is a hardened facility where employees would go during an emergency, Robbins said.

The NRC evaluates regulatory performance at commercial nuclear power plants with a color-coded process that classifies regulatory findings as either green, white, yellow or red, in order of increasing safety significance. The failure to properly maintain the TSC ventilation system has been preliminarily determined by the NRC to be "white," or of low to moderate safety significance.

No decision on enforcement action will be made at the meeting. NRC officials will review information presented by FPL and reach a decision on appropriate regulatory action at a later date.

The meeting will be open to the public and NRC officials will be available after the meeting to answer any questions.

An NRC inspection report with information on the issue is available through the NRC website at www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html. The number to access the document is ML120260599.

Anyone interested in attending the meeting or participating by telephone should contact the NRC's Daniel Rich at 404-997-4721 or Daniel.Rich@nrc.gov or Michael Donithan at 404-997-4538 or Michael.Donithan@nrc.gov.