Early Monday morning, operators brought the Hope Creek nuclear plant back online after a brief shutdown this weekend to address a faulty pump.
The recirculation pump tripped Thursday afternoon. Operators brought the reactor to 55 percent power as plant personnel began troubleshooting the pump. On Sunday the reactor was shut down completely so the pump’s motor generator circuitry could be repaired, a PSEG spokesman told the Today’s Sunbeam newspaper in Salem County, N.J. The neighboring Salem reactors were unaffected.
No emergency was declared, based on event reports compiled by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Hope Creek plant near Wilmington, Del., uses a single 1,061 megawatt GE-4 boiling water reactor with Mark I containment, according to the NRC.