New Jersey's Hope Creek reactor exited a brief outage just after midnight Thursday after a valve replacement.
The PSEG plant had taken the unit offline to address a malfunctioning safety release valve. The South Jersey Times reported that operators powered the reactor down on Friday evening to replace the valve, rather than wait for a refueling outage next spring. The repair was completed successfully, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reported that the plant had reached 25 percent power as of Thursday morning.
Hope Creek is one of three reactors at the Artificial Island complex south of Wilmington, Del. The unit is a 1,178 megawatt General Electric type 4 boiling water reactor first licensed in 1986.