Tennessee Valley Authority’s Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant is near Athens, Ala.ABOUT THE PLANT• Construction began in 1966, and the plant began operating in 1974.• In March 2002, Brown’s Ferry Unit 3 finished the longest unbroken operational run of a TVA nuclear unit and the second longest among all U.S. plants. It ran nonstop for 669 days before going offline for a scheduled refueling outage, generating a world-record 18 million megawatt hours during that time.Source: Tennessee Valley Authority
One of the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant’s shutdown reactors lost cooling for about 40 minutes Thursday evening, triggering another mandatory notification of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
TVA spokesman Ray Golden said the new problem was akin to an electrical short that occurred as maintenance employees were working on electrical relays.
The problem caused a Unit 3 cooling pump to lose power. When the problem was discovered, the system was reset, much as a breaker switch would be flipped, he said.
The reactor cooling water temperature rose about 10 degrees during that 40 minutes – from 112.5 degrees to 122 degrees, according to the report TVA filed with the NRC.