TVA's Sequoyah Unit 1 nuclear reactor near Soddy-Daisy generated electricity 99.6 percent of the year during 2014.As TVA was restarting its Watts Bar Nuclear Plant Monday after a nine-day outage, one of the units at the Sequoyah Nuclear Power Plant unexpectedly tripped Monday morning when an electric fault caused the turbine to go offline and shut down the reactor.
TVA spokesman Jim Hopson said TVA is investigating the incident at the Unit 2 reactor at Sequoyah and hopes to have the problem identified and corrected soon to reactive the unit. Hopson said the Sequoyah reactor automatically shut down at 6:45 a.m. EST on Monday after an electrical problem caused the unit's power generation system to shut down.
"Plant equipment responded as designed and station operators responded appropriately during the shutdown," Hopson said. "As a result, there was no safety impact to the public or to plant employees."
The Sequoyah incident came on the same day that TVA resumed power generation at its Unit 1 reactor at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant. That unit had been offline since Feb. 21 when plant operators shut down the reactor when they discovered a faulty seal in the condenser.