Vogtle shuts down reactor twice this week

A nuclear reactor at Vogtle Electric Generating Plant was shut down twice this week.

"High vibrations" in one of the turbines took the blame for the second shutdown about 11:10 p.m. Tuesday as crews prepared to put Unit 1, which was idled Monday by an equipment malfunction, back online. The vibrations were noticed as workers were in the process of syncing it back to the grid, according to Alyson Fuqua, a spokeswoman for Southern Nuclear, the company that operates Plant Vogtle.

"It was our decision both for safety reasons and to protect our equipment," Ms. Fuqua said. "We decided to manually shut it down and investigate where the vibrations were coming from."

By Friday afternoon, Ms. Fuqua said, crews were powering the reactor back up.

The loss of a condenser vacuum -- which sucks water from the condenser pumps and supplies it to the turbine -- prompted the first shutdown. Ms. Fuqua said the two incidents were in different parts of the reactor. She said no customers lost power because the company pulled power off the electrical grid.

Roger Hannah, of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency in Atlanta, said two incidents back-to-back are uncommon but not unheard of. He said that after an outage crews are more likely to encounter things that prompt them to shut a reactor back down than power it back up.

"Particularly when you are coming up out of an outage, you run into things you don't run into when you've been operating at power for a while," Mr. Hannah said. A team is investigating the incidents.

Each reactor generates about 1,230 megawatts of electricity, which supplies more than 300,000 homes. Site work is under way at Vogtle for the nation's first two new nuclear reactors in decades.

The two reactors will produce 1,170 megawatts each and are expected to go online in 2016 and 2017. The project will cost $14.5 billion.

Reach Adam Folk at (706) 823-3339 or adam.folk@augustachronicle.com