Exelon Nuclear's Limerick Generating Station.
LIMERICK PA – In a rare incident Wednesday night (June 23, 2010) at 8:54, operators at Exelon Nuclear’s Limerick Generating Station manually shut down its Unit 1 reactor after both of the unit’s two recirculation pumps stopped working, Exelon spokesman Joseph Szafran reported.
Szafran, in a brief press release e-mailed to local media Wednesday at 11:56 p.m., said the shut-down went “as expected, safely and without incident.” It involved “no risk to the public,” he added, and there were “no injuries associated with the shutdown.”
Limerick’s Unit 2 reactor continues to operate at full power, according to Szafran.
The Unit 1 shut-down comes only a little more than two months after an expanded team of Exelon employees and sub-contractors completed a 22-day-long refueling and maintenance outage there. The generating station at the time brought in more than 1,900 additional specialized workers to refuel the reactor and perform inspections, tests, maintenance and modifications on components and equipment.
When the maintenance outage started in late March (2010), Exelon boasted Unit 1 had successfully completed a power-generating run of 727 days. It was said to have set a new continuous run record at Limerick, as well as the second longest continuous run for a boiling water reactor in the United States.
Chris Mudrick, who then was Limerick site vice president but who has since been promoted, said Exelon had “replaced one-third of the reactor’s fuel, and performed preventive and corrective maintenance activities on plant equipment, to ensure reliable operations for the upcoming 24-month operating cycle.”
Szafran’s Wednesday e-mail did not offer an estimate on how long Unit 1 was expected to be out, the suspected or determined cause of the pumps’ failure, or details on the repairs assumed to be under way.
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