NRC to host open house on Fermi plant's 2025 safety performance

Fermi’s 2025 safety review landed in the NRC’s lowest-concern band, and the agency is bringing the people who wrote it to Carleton for an in-person open house. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission will be at the Carleton Branch Library Community Room, 1444 Kent St. in Carleton, Michigan, on Wednesday, May 27, from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. EDT to walk through how Fermi performed and to take questions from local residents.

This is an information meeting with a question-and-answer session, not a public hearing soliciting regulatory comments. That distinction matters. The NRC is not building a regulatory record in the room, but it is putting its inspectors in front of the public, including Karla Stoedter, chief of Reactor Projects Branch 2 in the Division of Operating Reactor Safety, along with senior resident inspector Thomas Taylor and resident inspector Zachary Fleming. For anyone trying to understand what the agency actually saw at the plant, that is the point of the exercise.

The annual assessment letter for Fermi Unit 2, accession number ML26063A882, said the plant’s 2025 performance stayed in the very low safety significance range, with all inspection findings and performance indicators Green. Under the NRC’s Reactor Oversight Process, that kind of result keeps a plant in normal oversight, which still means thousands of inspection hours each year. The agency’s inspection plan for Fermi includes baseline inspections through December 31, 2026, and those routine resident-inspector inspections are separate from that plan.

Fermi Unit 2 is operated by DTE Electric Company under docket 50-341, license NPF-43. It is a General Electric Type 4 boiling-water reactor with 3,486 licensed MWt. The operating license was issued July 15, 1985, and now expires March 20, 2045. The NRC places the plant about 25 miles northeast of Toledo, Ohio, in Region III, and DTE Electric serves about 2.3 million customers in southeastern Michigan.

The 2025 inspection record was not spotless, even if the overall assessment was clean. A March 31, 2025 integrated inspection documented one Green finding that involved a violation of NRC requirements and was treated as a non-cited violation. A June 30, 2025 inspection documented one Green finding that did not involve a violation. A December 31, 2024 inspection also recorded one Green finding treated as a non-cited violation. That is exactly the kind of detail residents usually want spelled out: not whether the plant was perfect, but what the Green marks meant and how the agency kept score.

The open house is where the NRC gets tested on that answer, face to face. Fermi’s scorecard says the plant stayed safe in 2025; the room in Carleton will decide whether that explanation feels like real transparency or just the annual check-in.