Pilgrim nuclear plant temporarily shut downApr 17 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Sean Teehan Cape Cod Times, Hyannis, Mass.
The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station remains powered down after a planned refueling outage that started Sunday night. The plant shut off power at 10:17 p.m. Sunday, said Carol Wightman, a spokeswoman for Entergy Nuclear, the company that owns Pilgrim. A leak-rate test of the plant's primary containment air lock failed, Wightman said. These are maintenance and capital improvements that can't be done when the plant is operating, Wightman said Tuesday morning. Wightman declined to comment on how long the plant would remain powered down. During such shutdowns, staff at the plant conduct a number of safety tests as well as improvements to the facility, she said. Pilgrim, which generates about 680 megawatts of electricity, will not provide any electricity to the ISO New England power grid during the shutdown, Wightman said. The shutdown came less than two weeks after opponents of the power plant met with officials from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission during a meeting at Plymouth Town Hall. Much of the discontent with NRC officials stemmed from the regulatory committee's approval last year of a 20-year extension of the 40-year-old plant. The plant exceeds industry averages for automatic shutdowns and unplanned power changes. A federal appeals court in February rejected state Attorney General Martha Coakley's legal challenge to the relicensing. Coakley argued that the NRC did not take into consideration the 2011 nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in Japan. The room grew loud and chaotic early on during that meeting, as people crowded around different NRC officials, grilling them about evacuation plans in the case of a disaster and plans for a dry cask storage facility for spent nuclear fuel at the plant. Some who attended the NRC meeting were also among those arrested for trespassing on Pilgrim's property last month. Those arrests occurred shortly after a Plymouth District judge dismissed charges against 11 people for entering the property during a protest last May. After the dismissal, Paul Rifkin of Cotuit and Michael Risch of Falmouth -- who were arrested in May -- joined three other protesters in marching onto Pilgrim's property and were arrested when they refused police orders to leave the property. http://www.energycentral.com/functional/news/news_detail.cfm?did=28279335 |