Unit 1 at Virginia's North Anna nuclear plant returned to service over the weekend after a refueling outage and an aborted restart attempt that began Thursday.
The Dominion reactor northwest of Richmond reached 48 percent power Friday afternoon before the unit shut down automatically, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. Safety systems actuated because a protection relay for a station service transformer was not returned to its proper configuration. The utility indicated the unit returned to service Sunday afternoon.
North Anna uses two Westinghouse pressurized water reactors. Unit 1 was licensed in 1978. According to public contributions from nuclear workers on roadtechs.com, its latest maintenance outage began on Sept. 8. The Times-Dispatch reported that Dominion Virginia's next maintenance outage will soon take place at its Surry plant near Newport News.