New inspection for MS nuke plant

There was another unplanned outage at Mississippi’s Grand Gulf nuclear power plant that is giving concerns to federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulators over reliability problems at the largest single-unit nuclear power plant in the U.S. The outage is heightening scrutiny over whether problems at Entergy Corp.’s plant may be affecting power markets across the southeast. Operators took the Port Gibson, Miss., area plant offline last week, citing problems with a turbine bypass valve. The Dec. 12 outage came to light Dec. 18 when the NRC announced a special inspection. In November, the NRC wrote a notification letter to Entergy downgrading its safety rating from the safest of four levels to white, the second safest. The letter cited a number of equipment failures, which has led to the supplemental inspection to explore the root causes of the problems. The latest outage was at least the sixth unplanned decrease in output at the plant over the past 15 months, according to NRC documents. Grand Gulf took a nearly six-month outage in 2016-17 aimed at improving performance because it did not, in the words of Chief Nuclear Officer Chris Bakken, “meet our standards of excellence.” Grand Gulf, which began in 1985, is 90 percent owned by Entergy and 10 percent owned by Cooperative Energy, a Mississippi group that supplies power to cooperatives. Entergy’s subsidiaries in Mississippi, Arkansas, New Orleans, and elsewhere in Louisiana have contracts to buy power from the plant. (Source: Mississippi Business Journal 12/19/18)