As the Unit 3 nuclear reactor at Indian Point Energy Center came back online Thursday morning following a three-day outage, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has directed the state Public Service Commission to conduct an investigation of the plant and report on its findings.
The reactor at the Buchanan power plant automatically shut down Dec. 14 after an electrical disturbance was sensed by the main generator. In a statement released by Entergy Corp., the company that owns Indian Point, said workers replaced electrical insulators on the transmission line and will inspect them to help determine a cause for the electrical fault.
In recent weeks, Cuomo has stepped up his opposition efforts to the plant”™s continued operation.
When the Unit 2 reactor went offline for three days earlier this month ”“ control operators shut down the reactor after power was lost to about 10 of Unit 2”™s control rods related to a malfunction with a roof fan ”“ Cuomo sent state Department of Public Service employees to investigate the issue.
This outage was the first unplanned shut down for Unit 2 in 2015. Unit 3 has had five unscheduled outages this year.
Cuomo penned a letter Dec. 16 to Audrey Zibelman, chairwoman of the Public Service Commission, with more articulate instructions about conducting an investigation of Indian Point”™s outages.
“I would specifically request that you examine the capital and maintenance budgets at the plants and their potential impact on these outages, and the impact these sudden outages have on the continued safe operation of the plants,” he said in the letter. Cuomo also asked that investigators present their findings before Feb. 15, 2016.
A spokesman for Entergy said in a statement that the company is aware of the letter and will review it, as well as reiterating that inspectors with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency that regulates the U.S. nuclear industry, “spend thousands of hours each year reviewing operations, and have stated the plant is safe.”
The license for the Unit 3 reactor expired at midnight Dec. 12, but it can run indefinitely on an extended license granted by the NRC because Entergy filed a “timely renewal” application to relicense the reactor. The application, submitted in April 2007, was considered timely because Entergy filed the request to relicense both of its active reactors more than five years in advance of them expiring. Unit 2 expired in September 2013.
