Nuke news is guards' snooze

Sleeping guards at a South Florida nuclear plant earned a hefty fine for the Florida's largest utility. Florida Power & Light faces a $130,000 fine for catnapping security at its Turkey Point nuclear plant, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Thursday.

The NRC ''concluded that on multiple occasions during 2004-2006, security officers at Turkey Point were willfully inattentive to duty, or served as lookouts such that other security officers could be inattentive to duty,'' the commission said in a letter to FPL dated Tuesday.

While the guards were employees of Wackenhut, NRC officials said in their letter, ``FPL failed to thoroughly evaluate and address the root and contributing causes of security force inattentiveness and the complicity and facilitation by other security personnel of behavior while on duty."

In other nuke plant news, Georgia Power has reached an agreement with Westinghouse Electric Co. and The Shaw Group to design and build two 1,100-megawatt nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in east Georgia, which is co-owned with other utilities and already is home to two reactors. "Combined with the existing reactors, the units would make Plant Vogtle, along the Savannah River southeast of Augusta, one of the nation's largest generators of nuclear power," the Associated Press reports.

To read more about the NRC fine, click here and here. To read about the Georgia nuke plants, click here.

--Asjylyn Loder and Craig Pittman