Green Blog: Nuclear Plants Get Through the Storm With Little Trouble

The nuclear reactors in Sandy?s path mostly handled the storm well ? better than other parts of the region?s electric system.

But one reactor, on the New Jersey coast, declared a low-level emergency because rising water threatened to submerge pumps it uses to pull in cooling water.

That plant, Oyster Creek, in Toms River, about 60 miles east of Philadelphia, had shut a week earlier for refueling, but still had cooling requirements, especially for its spent fuel pool, where fuel used decades ago is stored; that fuel must be kept submerged, and continues to generate waste heat.

Oyster Creek declared an alert, the second lowest on the four-step emergency scale established by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, on Monday night. If the operators had been forced to turn off the water-intake pumps, they might have had to use fire hoses to add water to the pool, to make up for evaporation as it heated up.

According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, without any cooling, the pool would have taken about 25 hours to reach the boiling point, giving the operators time to implement an alternate cooling method.

Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the commission, said that the operators of the plant, which is owned by Exelon, had moved a portable pump into the threatened building in case the regular pump had been submerged, but they had not had to use it. In a statement, David Tillman, a spokesman for Exelon, the plant?s owner, said that no water had flooded into the plant and that ?all safety and backup systems operated fully and reliably.?

The reactor?s operators hoped to exit the ?alert? status on Tuesday.

The number of alerts declared at plants around the country is usually a handful a year. According to the N.R.C. definition, an alert means ?events are in process or have occurred which involve an actual or potential substantial degradation of the level of safety of the plant.? Radiation releases, if any, are expected to be a small fraction of the level that would require action offsite, according to the definition.

In Buchanan, N.Y., Indian Point 3 shut down at 10:41 on Monday night because of a disturbance on the high-voltage grid, but Indian Point 2 continued running. Upstate, Nine Mile Point 1 automatically shut down when the flow of power into the plant failed; Nine Mile Point 2 also felt the disturbance but its emergency diesel generators started up and it kept running, Mr. Sheehan said. Nuclear plants deliver huge quantities of electricity to the grid, but they run some of their equipment on power drawn from the grid, so that if they shut down suddenly, their equipment is still powered.

Three reactors reduced power, partly at the urging of the regional grid operators, who said that if one of the plants had failed suddenly at full power, the loss would destabilize the system. Those were Millstone 3, in Waterford, Conn., and Limerick 1 and 2, in the Pennsylvania town of the same name, northwest of Philadelphia.

Some reactors also reported that some of their emergency sirens had been knocked out by the storm.

The NRC said it would continue to monitor the affected plants.

Source: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/nuclear-plants-get-through-the-storm-with-little-trouble/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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