3607944

Bellows Rupture Pulls Cook Unit 2 Offline

3607944

A post-midnight rupture in a steam bellows at the Cook Nuclear Plant early today resulted in the plant's Unit 2 being taken off-line for investigation and repairs. While considered an "Unusual Event," it never caused a threat to safety and no injuries were incurred.

Indiana Michigan Power’s Cook Nuclear Plant Unit 2 was taken off-line at 12:38 a.m. today when an expansion joint bellows on a Moisture Separator Re-heater ruptured. That component provides non-radioactive steam to the low pressure turbines. The expansion joint bellows is roughly 48 inches in diameter.

The rupture released pressurized, high-temperature steam to the surrounding area causing damage to an adjacent Turbine Building exterior wall, however, no one was in the area at the time and there were no injuries.
 
An Unusual Event (UE) was declared at 12:50 a.m. due to the unanticipated event. It was terminated at 2:07 a.m. An Unusual Event is the least serious emergency plan classification. All appropriate notifications to local, state and federal officials were made.

During the manual shutdown by operators there were no complications and all equipment responded appropriately.

ADVERTISEMENT
Your content continues below

Cook Unit 1 remains at 100 percent power. Causal analysis and repair estimates are under development. AEP does not release return-to-service information for generation units.

****UPDATE****4:07PM****UPDATE****4:07PM****

The following statement regarding the incident has been provided by Viktoria Mitlyng from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission:

On July 6, an incident at the DC Cook Nuclear Plant, Unit 2, resulted the declaration of an Unusual Event, the lowest level of alert on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s emergency response scale. The NRC is reviewing the circumstances around the incident, which involved a steam line rupture and subsequent damage to a turbine building wall on the non-nuclear side of the Unit 2.
 
Unit 2 was manually shut down and is in a stable condition. The incident did not impact public health and safety. Unit 1 remains at full power.

An NRC resident inspector immediately responded to the plant after being notified of the event to closely follow the company’s actions.  NRC inspectors at the site and in the NRC Region III Office in Lisle, Ill., are independently evaluating the company’s response to the situation, the plant’s assessment of what caused the steam pipe rupture and will review repairs as they occur.

DC Cook, operated by Indiana Michigan Power Co., is located in Bridgman, Mich., 13 miles south of Benton Harbor.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

*