Apr. 25--An oversight 15 years ago at Progress Energy's Shearon Harris nuclear plant ranked as the second-closest any U.S. reactor has come to a nuclear meltdown during the past two decades, Greenpeace reported Monday.

The environmental group, which opposes nuclear power, released a safety report to challenge industry claims of a sterling safety record.

The report comes as Progress Energy of Raleigh, Duke Power of Charlotte and other utilities are seeking to license the nation's first new reactors in three decades. The report reviews nearly 200 problems reported by many of the country's 64 nuclear sites.

Regulators and Progress Energy officials said the incident at the Shearon Harris plant in southern Wake County was serious, but they criticized the Greenpeace characterizations as alarmist.

"We dispute the part that these are 'near misses,' " said Progress Energy spokesman Rick Kimble. "'Near miss' makes it sound like it's minutes from a meltdown. ... This was a case that, if a series of incidents had happened -- all of them statistically remote -- then you could have had a partial failure."

During the 1991 malfunction, a backup cooling system at the Shearon Harris plant had not been functional for about a year before the problem was caught. The system would have discharged some water on the floor instead of pumping all the emergency coolant to the nuclear reactor core.

The likelihood of a nuclear meltdown under such conditions is about once in 167 years, said David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Washington organization critical of the nuclear industry.

Greenpeace issued its "An American Chernobyl" report on the 20th anniversary of the Ukrainian meltdown. The explosion and radiation in the former Soviet Union helped sway public opinion against nuclear power.

But utilities are betting that they can win approval for the first new reactors in the U.S. in more than two decades. Progress Energy has said it is considering adding a reactor at its Shearon Harris site to keep up with surging demand for power.

According to Greenpeace, the Shearon Harris plant, along with Duke Power's Catawba reactors in South Carolina, are among eight reactors that have had the most dangerous "near misses" since the 1986 Chernobyl accident.

The group cites Duke Power for more close calls than any other nuclear operator in the country, with multiple incidents at the company's Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina.

Shearon Harris, about 20 miles southwest of Raleigh, is cited for four close calls.

"The point is these events and conditions could have led to a meltdown," said Jim Riccio, the nuclear policy analyst at Greenpeace. "If the system were working as it should have, you shouldn't have come this close."

Duke Power spokeswoman Rita Sipe said the industry's safety record is excellent.

"Multiple layers of protection and redundancy in the nuclear industry allows us to operate safely and has for decades," Sipe said.

Greenpeace compiled data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency that oversees nuclear safety and operations. An NRC official said Monday that the raw data in the report is correct, but the agency disputed conclusions drawn by Greenpeace.

"None of these incidents led to damage of a reactor," said NRC spokesman Scott Burnell.

The NRC did not issue a fine for the Shearon Harris problem in 1991, which was caused by an equipment design flaw. Because the utility had safety backup systems in place, Kimble said, the NRC allowed Shearon Harris to operate for several months until a scheduled refueling outage.

The industry's most serious incident, at the Davis Besse plant in Ohio, led to a $5.45 million fine for allowing the reactor vessel dome to deteriorate to the point that it was less than a year from rupturing. The NRC also banned one of the plant's nuclear engineers from working at a plant for five years. The Davis Besse incident and the 1991 Shearon Harris malfunction merited the same risk factor for nuclear meltdown in the Greenpeace report.

Greenpeace also lists a number of plants that were significantly less likely to have a meltdown, but still elicited concerns. These include Progress Energy's H.B. Robinson plant in South Carolina, Duke Power's McGuire plant northwest of Charlotte, and Duke's Oconee and Catawba plants in South Carolina. The problems included inoperable valves, failed pumps, loss of off-site power and equipment failures.

"If all these events were in the 1986-87-88 time frame, then we could say the industry is right: We're learning our lessons and improving," Lochbaum said. "But some of the events are occurring as recently as 2002, so we have a ways to go before we claim victory."