Palisades Nuclear Power Plant operated safely last year despite an unexpected shut down. That’s according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The plant in Covert shut itself off days before a scheduled outage to refuel the plant in September.
The electronic system that controls the turbine shut down, which in turn shut off the plant’s reactor.
Cindy Pederson is the deputy regional administrator for the NRC. She says the system did what it was supposed to do.
“When a plant has a shut down like this, this is an analyzed, expected and safe condition for the plant. So there was nothing unsafe about that evolution or that shut down," she says.
The NRC spent more than six thousand hours at Palisades this past year. Because of an incident in 2014, where workers were accidentally exposed to a higher radiation dose, the NRC increased oversight at Palisades for the first part of 2015.
