The Unit 3 nuclear reactor that was shut down this week at Indian Point Energy Center due to a faulty pump came back online Thursday.
The reactor uses three condensate pumps to transfer water into steam generators and one automatically shut down for unknown reasons Wednesday, causing water levels to fluctuate. The Buchanan plant”™s operators manually shut down the reactor that day.
Unit 3 is running on two pumps while the third gets repaired.
The pump being fixed was refurbished in 2013 and had been tested and found to be satisfactory in March when Unit 3 was shut down for a planned refueling outage, Jerry Nappi, a spokesman with the plant”™s owner, Entergy Corp., said in an email.
Unit 2 has operated continuously for 478 days, while this incident marks the fourth unplanned shut down for Unit 3 in about nine weeks, during which time the reactor was not running for 19 days.
“Even inclusive of these recent shutdowns the plant is typically online generating electricity more than 90% of the time,” Nappi said in the email.
