The nuclear power plant in Perry, Ohio, operated by the FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company (FENOC), had an emergency shutdown Saturday evening.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) event log shows that at 7:29 p.m. on July 27, the reactor automatically shut down after a “main turbine trip.”
Via the event log’s summary, the trip was “not complex,” but its cause is still unknown and is being investigated by FENOC.
The PR firm handling FirstEnergy’s media inquiries told Scene Tuesday that that plant was still shut down. FENOC was “making preparations” for restarting the reactor after the outage, which they say occurred during routine weekly testing.
“FirstEnergy Solutions will continue to make the safety of our communities and employees our top priority,” read a prepared statement.
When Scene inquired how long it would be before the reactor was up and running — hours? days? — a spokeswoman said that because the Perry plant operates in the “competitive market,” they do not disclose expected outage lengths.
Prema Chandrathil, a spokeswoman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told Scene that the turbine which automatically triggered the shutdown was located outside the nuclear containment structure, and that there was no nuclear threat.
“Our resident inspectors have determined that there is no nuclear safety concern,” she said, “and we will be following the license-holder as they investigate the cause of the trip.”
(The “license-holder” refers to FENOC. All commercial nuclear plants in the United States must be licensed by the NRC and have at least two NRC inspectors on site.)
Chandrathil said she was unable to speculate on the length of the outage or on the cause of the equipment malfunction, but said that in general, American nuclear facilities are designed to protect themselves so that if there is any minor issue, they automatically shut down. Plants are also required to do periodic testing, which was when the Perry facility’s turbine issue emerged.
“From our perspective, the reactor responded as designed,” she said.
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This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2019.
Perry is a BWR. The drawing you show is a PWR. There is a significant difference.
On top of what Evan said where Perry is a BWR not a PWR, the plant did not experience an emergency shutdown. It was unplanned but there was no emergency. The NRC notification you cite even says ‘NON-EMERGENCY’.
Evan, although there are significant technical differences between BWRs and PWRs, in the context of this article those differences matter little since both both designs include a reactor core and a steam turbine. Sure, the correct diagram should have been used but that oversight need not detract from the message being conveyed: there was an unplanned reactor SCRAM.
Jim, don’t confuse the NRC’s narrow definition of what constitutes an emergency situation with an accepted synonym, emergency shutdown, for the event also known as a “reactor SCRAM” or “reactor trip”. The NRC event report also states that the “trip was not complex”. Also a technical term. Yet the operators had to manually close the main steam isolation vales to “prevent exceeding Reactor Pressure Vessel Cooldown Rate.” The operators also had to manually initiate the Rector Core Isolation Cooling to stabilize Reactor Vessel Water Level and Pressure following MSIV closure. Not complex by definition, but neither was the event trivial.