Minnesota has a nuke plant event [View All]

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Xcel Energy today said its Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant shut down over the weekend due to low oil pressure in its turbines. The 600-megawatt plant shut down at 11:12 p.m. Saturday when four pressure switches sensed low oil pressure in its turbines, Xcel spokeswoman Mary Sandok said today. The switches activated relays that triggered the reactor protection system, causing the turbine oil valve to close to protect the equipment. The valve closure resulted in an automatic plant shutdown, Sandok said. There was no radiation release and no danger to the public or plant workers, Sandok said. Xcel officials said the outage is not expected to be lengthy but declined to specify how long. Estimating the length of the outage could affect the price of energy that Xcel will buy on the open market to make up for the loss of Monticello, Sandok said. The single-reactor plant, located about 40 miles northwest of Minneapolis, generates enough electricity to power nearly 500,000 homes. This is
the third non-scheduled outage reported at the nuclear power plant this year. "While we are still investigating the cause of the weekend outage, the causes of the first two were unrelated," Sandok said. On Oct. 21, the plant had a 10-day outage when a cable failure caused a transformer to lock out, interrupting non-safety related electricity from reaching the plant from the grid. In June, Xcel shut down the plant to replace a faulty safety valve that had been installed on the plant's main steam line just a few months previously during a scheduled refueling outage.
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