Watts Bar 2 Shuts Down After Failure

摘要

The Tennessee Valley Authority is working to determine what caused the structural supports of a refurbished condenser to fail and how best to repair the damage at the newly commissioned Watts Bar 2 nuclear unit on the Tennessee River. Repairs on the condenser, original to the mothballed nuclear plant, will be a logistical challenge, TVA spokesman Jimmie Hopson says. "How do you get steel into a sealed metal box?" The owner hired Chicago Bridge & Iron to manage the repairs. The federal power producer notified the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on March 23 that the unit was shut after the main condenser lost vacuum as it was starting up from an outage.