Nuclear Plants Get Through the Superstorm Sandy With Little Trouble
_Featured_, News Flash Wednesday, October 31st, 2012
Oyster Creek nuclear plant in New Jersey declared a low-level emergency because of rising water from Superstorm Sandy
The nuclear reactors in Sandy’s path mostly handled the storm well — better than other parts of the region’s electric system.
But one reactor, on the New Jersey coast, declared a low-level emergency because rising water threatened to submerge pumps it uses to pull in cooling water.
That plant, Oyster Creek, in Toms River, about 60 miles east of Philadelphia, had shut a week earlier for refueling, but still had cooling requirements, especially for its spent fuel pool, where fuel used decades ago is stored; that fuel must be kept submerged, and continues to generate waste heat.
Oyster Creek declared an alert, the second lowest on the four-step emergency scale established by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, on Monday night. If the operators had been forced to turn off the water-intake pumps, they might have had to use fire hoses to add water to the pool, to make up for evaporation as it heated up.
According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, without any cooling, the pool would have taken about 25 hours to reach the boiling point, giving the operators time to implement an alternate cooling method.
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