nuclear-news

One month after a thunderstorm led to a scram, the US NRC announced that there had been a loss of cooling the next day (which could have led to a nuclear meltdown, if not corrected quickly enough) and promised investigation: “The plant was operating at full power when a lightning strike caused a momentary surge in the plant’s offsite power supply, triggering an unplanned shutdown. Operators subsequently took appropriate actions to place the plant in a safe shutdown condition. The following day, operational errors led to a one hour loss of shutdown cooling.

The purpose of this special inspection is to better understand the circumstances surrounding the loss of shutdown cooling, determine if operator response was appropriate…“http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/2016/16-002.iv.pdf See statement at bottom of our blog post.

Note that the Three Mile Island Nuclear Disaster was well underway within 2 hours (6 am) of the reactor trip and SCRAM (4 am)…