By Associated Press
Athens AL – For the fifth time in four months, the Tennessee Valley Authority's Unit 1 reactor at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant is shut down.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission reported Monday that the reactor was operating at full power Friday morning when a turbine trip forced it to automatically shut down.
Browns Ferry spokesman Jason Huffine said Monday the unit remained idle.
"We are still looking at some maintenance activities to safely return the unit back to operation."
He said the Unit 2 and Unit 3 reactors were continuing to operate at full power.
Huffine said there was never any danger to anyone or the environment and all "plant systems functioned as designed."
A leaky hydraulic system discovered Sept. 3 forced the fourth shutdown of the reactor since it was restarted June 2 after a $1.8 billion refurbishment. Unit 1 was back near full power two days later.
The three previous shutdowns one of which involved another hydraulic leak also resulted in brief outages of Unit 1.
TVA restarted Unit 1 after five years of renovation work. The reactor had been off line since 1985, when the entire plant was shut down over safety and management concerns.
TVA is the nation's largest public utility, providing wholesale electricity through 158 distributors to about 8.7 million consumers and directly to several dozen large manufacturers in Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.