ERWIN -- Eight U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission staffers and a meeting facilitator spent three hours on Thursday night answering questions about operations at the Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc., plant.

But by the time the public meeting at Erwin Town Hall ended about 9 p.m. Thursday, audience members had peppered NRC staffers with even more questions.

The NRC staffers promised that a follow-up meeting would be held sometime in the next three to six months to address the new questions and other public concerns.

The NRC's Peter Habighorst also said during the meeting that the NRC has only begun the process of deciding if it will grant a request from NFS to renew the company's operating license for another 40 years.

Habighorst said a decision likely will not be made before next May.

In response to a question from the audience, Habighorst also said the NRC had granted 40-year license extensions to two other facilities that it regulates. But he noted that neither of those facilities was as old as the NFS plant in Erwin.

NFS, which manufactures fuel for U.S. Navy submarines and aircraft carriers and down-blends highly enriched uranium to a low-enriched state for conversion into fuel for TVA nuclear power plants, began operating in Erwin in 1957, according to its Web site.

Thursday's meeting began with a welcome to audience members from Chip Cameron, an NRC meeting facilitator, followed by opening remarks from Eugene Cobey, the NRC's Region II deputy director of fuel facility inspection.

Cobey, who was the highest ranking NRC official present, later maintained that although there have been a series of incidents at the NFS plant about which the NRC is concerned, the NRC believes the plant continues to be run in a manner that poses no threats to the public or the environment.

He also said the NRC has established a new page dedicated to the NFS plant on the NRC Web site. The new page, he said, is still under development, but already has inspection reports, performance reviews and other information posted.

The new NRC Web page dedicated to NFS can be viewed at: www://nrc.gov/info-finder/materials/fuel-cycle/nucelar-fuel-services.html .

Joey Ledford, an NRC public affairs officer, said answers to questions posed by the public about the NFS plant can be found on the new NFS Web page under "frequently asked questions."

NRC staffers delivered a slide presentation that focused on radioactive effluents, the radioactive element tecnetium-99 and environmental assessments.

The NRC's Mary Thomas said she and another NRC staffer visit NFS twice a year to observe the taking of water samples.

Thomas said that while the NRC has jurisdiction over radioactive effluents, it does not have regulatory control over chemical effluents at the NFS site.

She noted that NFS does both on-site and off-site monitoring for radioactive elements in ground water.

Reports the NRC receives and reviews, Thomas said, don't show any radioactive contamination in water off the NFS site.

The NRC's Manuel Crespo told the audience that there is no indication the technetium-99 had escaped from the NFS site. He noted that groundwater beneath the plant had been contaminated when a storage tank leaked a number of years ago.

But Crespo said NFS cleanup efforts had resulted in the radioactive element being virtually eliminated.

Technetium-99, a by-product of nuclear reactor operations, had been brought to the NFS plant in filters from which NFS had removed uranium.

Not everyone during at the meeting appeared to be satisfied with the operations of the NFS plant or the actions of the NRC.

Hollywood actress and Greene County resident Park Overall said NFS had amassed a record of more than 400 operational problems over the years.

Buzz Davies, who identified himself as a retired Oak Ridge quality engineer, told the NRC that he was concerned about the NFS plant's commercial development (CD) line being allowed to process fluorine gas.

Davies suggested that the CD line be moved to a federal reservation in Oak Ridge, where it would be away from populated areas in the event of a leak.

But an NRC staffer said the agency believes sufficient safety measures are in place at the NFS plant to allow the CD line to continue to operate there.

Joel Troy, who identified himself after the meeting as a Johnson City pharmacist "who drinks Jonesborough water," questioned why the NRC was moving away from imposing civil financial penalties against operators of plants such as the NFS plant.

"What are you going to do, spank them?" Troy asked.

Troy said he had understood that a $900,000 penalty against NFS had been reduced to only $20,000 by the NRC.

But NFS Safety and Regulatory Manager Marie Moore said the penalty to which Troy referred had been imposed, and modified, by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, not the NRC.

The NRC's Eugene Cobey said the NRC had already moved away from issuing civil penalties at "reactor facilities."

Cobey said the NRC had found civil penalties to be "largely ineffective" and noted that in the future, the agency likely would move away from imposing them at fuel-cycle facilities such as NFS.

Meeting facilitator Cameron said "alternative dispute resolution" by all federal regulatory agencies had been mandated by the U.S. Congress.

That process, he said, already had led to safety improvements at NFS.

The NRC's Cobey said alternative dispute resolution had been used by the NRC after a March 6, 2003, spill of a highly-enriched liquid uranium solution at the NFS plant.

"As far as this agency is concerned, we got significantly more corrective action to enhance safety out of that process," Cobey said.

At the close of the meeting, Greene County resident Trudy Wallack called on the NRC to continue doing its duty in regulating the NFS plant and noted that concerned residents plan to continue closely monitoring the NRC's activities.