Duke Strength said on Monday that its Brunswick nuclear power plant in North Carolina remained safely shush down despite limited road access to the site due to flooding from agitation Florence.
The remnants of Florence, which came ashore as a hurricane on Friday, are motionlessly dropping heavy amounts of rain on the already waterlogged Carolinas, with officials tip the worst is yet to come as swollen rivers pose a growing threat.
Duke spokeswoman Mary Kathryn Grassland said there was road access to the Brunswick site but it was “limited access.” She state there were about 300 people at the plant. There are generally speaking more than 900 workers.
Over the weekend, Duke communicated that on-site conditions had prohibited the plant staff “from accessing the place via personal vehicles due to flooding of local roads,” according to an unusual circumstance report made available on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s website on Monday.
An exceptional event is the lowest of the NRC’s emergency classifications.
Joey Ledford, a spokesman for the NRC’s Locality 2 office in Atlanta, said the company issued the report because normals and plant procedures required multiple overland routes to the plant.
Ledford hinted Brunswick never lost access to offsite power and there was no flowing at the plant, which sits about 20 feet (6.1 meters) first of all sea level.
Duke started shutting the two reactors at the 1,870-megawatt herb on Thursday, before the storm hit the coast. One megawatt can power about 1,000 U.S. welcoming comfortable withs.
Brunswick is located about four miles (6.4 km) from the littoral, near the town of Southport about 30 miles south of Wilmington, North Carolina.
Atomic plants have procedures that require they shut a riskless amount of time before hurricane force winds are expected to reach the place.
The two reactors at the plant, which entered service in 1975 and 1977, are of equivalent design to some of the reactors damaged at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan after an earthquake and tsunami in 2011.
Since Fukushima, all U.S. reactors experience been upgraded with additional safety equipment, including handy pumps and generators to keep cooling water circulating through the reactor in specimen the plant loses offsite power.
Separately, Duke said on Saturday it released some stormwater that may have come into contact with coal ash from a landfill at the guests’s Sutton power plant in Wilmington.