The owners of the Wolf Creek nuclear plant have taken one of its vendors to court over electrical work that preceded an unplanned reactor shutdown and outage last year.
A power loss in a switchyard caused the Burlington, Kan., reactor to trip on Jan. 13, 2012, according to a report filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The plant briefly lost offsite power, diesel generators kicked in and, although safety systems functioned as designed, the trip resulted in an outage that lasted more than 10 weeks. The incident also resulted in a yellow finding from the NRC last fall and tighter regulatory scrutiny for the plant.
On Tuesday, the Kansas City Business Journal reported that the plant's owners are blaming the event on work ABB conducted at Wolf Creek. A lawsuit filed in circuit court alleges that a startup transformer the company installed earlier was not properly insulated and short circuited when a generator output breaker failed. The suit also claims ABB performed additional substandard work at the plant and has asked the court for $25 million in damages.
Kansas City Power and Light and Kansas Gas and Electric own the plant with the Kansas Electric Power Cooperative. It generates about 1,200 megawatts using a single Westinghouse reactor first licensed in 1985, according to the NRC.