The Cook nuclear power plant’s Unit 2 reactor is back online again after being taken offline last Thursday, just a day after completing its latest refueling outage. Cook Spokesperson Bill Downey tells us the plant finished the outage last week and was being returned to 100% power when operators noticed a problem.
“One of the steam generators, the level reading of water that was being introduced to the steam generator was too high,” Downey said. “That indicator will automatically trip the unit, and that’s exactly was happened. It came offline, the operators took over, put it into safe condition, and we had to determine exactly what happened.”
From there, staff got to work on the issue. They learned a digital control that manages the feed water system needed to be adjusted. That was done throughout the weekend.
“They restarted the unit and synced to the grid, and we’re back online and everything is working just fine.”
Downey says the public was never in any danger. Once the crews realized what the issue was, the fix was relatively simple. Unit 2 was offline for 38 days for its latest refueling outage when it was brought back online last week. Downey says the next refueling outage will be for Unit 1 next fall.
