Unit 1 at Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear plant went offline unexpectedly Wednesday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reported.
At 5:34 p.m. EST safety systems in the reactor tripped, shutting it down from full power, according to the NRC. The agency stated “no significant activities were in progress that should have challenged the Reactor Protection System.”
Unit 2 was not affected, and unit 1 will remain in hot-standby while the NRC conducts an investigation. The plant southeast of Augusta, Ga., uses two, roughly 1,100 megawatt Westinghouse pressurized water reactors operated by Southern Nuclear Operating Co.
The Vogtle unit brought the total number of commercial reactors offline in the U.S. to 29. Refuelings and maintenance outages at a number of plants have resulted in the lowest nuclear output since October 2006, according to Bloomberg. At 71,781 megawatts yesterday, just over 70 percent of the country’s nuclear capacity was in use.