PILGRIM STATION: May 10 SCRAM caused by operator errors

From Wicked Local:

Here’s the good news. The nuclear plant’s equipment did what it was supposed to do and there was no release of radiation or damage to the containment vessel.

“This event had no impact on the health and/or safety of the public,” according to the Licensee Event Report (LER) Entergy filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The report also states, however, that back on May 10, inside the control room at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant – just hours before Entergy officials were scheduled to reassure the community that the plant was safe and that events at the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors in Japan had no special relevance to Plymouth – more than a half dozen highly trained engineers significantly messed up a routine restart of the reactor.

The plant was restarting the reactor after it had been offline for the better part of a month for its bi-annual refueling operation, a process Pilgrim has undertaken perhaps 20 times since the plant first began generating electricity in the early 1970s.

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