Apr. 28--Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors were at the Kewaunee nuclear plant Thursday after the reactor's owner declared its first alert in decades -- mobilizing local and state emergency response personnel.

There was no evacuation and no hazard to plant employees or the public from the incident, but questions were being raised about whether the operator of the plant went too far declaring an alert.

An alert is the second-lowest of four levels under an emergency classification system set up the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. That system classifies incidents, in order of increasing severity, as an unusual event, alert, site area emergency and general emergency.

This was the first time since that system was imposed that such an alert has been declared at either of Wisconsin's nuclear plants, industry spokesmen said Thursday.

"That's going to be the question everyone's going to be asking," said Joe Reid, local affairs manager for Dominion Resources Inc. Dominion, based in Richmond, Va., bought the plant last summer from two Wisconsin utilities.

Viktoria Mitlyng, a spokeswoman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said the action Dominion was quite "conservative, because essentially the equipment where the malfunctions occurred were not safety-related."

Reid said plant operators' decision to declare an alert was a "conservative measure. We did the right thing," he said. "Public safety has to be the number-one priority."

Mitlyng stressed that the NRC has not made any conclusions about whether or not Dominion should have declared an alert. The NRC will issue a report 30 days after it finishes its special inspection, she said.

The series of events that led to the alert began Tuesday when Kewaunee operators detected a small leak in a cooling system pipe for an emergency diesel generator and began to shut the plant down to fix the leak, the NRC and Dominion said.

The plant was being shut down gradually, but a pump in the secondary cooling system stopped unexpectedly. The shutdown of that pump should have prompted the main steam turbine to shut down and triggered an automatic shutdown of the nuclear reactor itself.

When the steam turbine didn't shut down, plant operators manually shut down both the turbine and the reactor.

Declaring an alert triggers the notification of emergency management personnel, both at the state Division of Emergency Management and the local emergency management offices in Kewaunee and nearManitowoc counties.

The alert lasted from 8:49 p.m. Tuesday to 12:24 a.m. Wednesday.

During the alert, the state's Emergency Operations Center in Madison was activated, and members from Emergency Management, the Wisconsin National Guard and the Radiation Protection Section of the state Department of Health and Family Services were in contact with the Kewaunee plant and Manitowoc and Kewaunee counties, said Johnnie Smith, administrator of Wisconsin Emergency Management, in a report to the Legislature, Gov. Jim Doyle and the state's congressional delegation.