The Brattleboro Reformer
August 16, 2004
TOBY HENRY
VERNON -- Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant officials say their facility maintained 100 percent power output during the massive blackout across parts of the northeastern United States and Canada this week, adding that the plant's energy helped restore power to parts of New York.
"Our focus (Thursday) night was to keep Vermont online as a reserve to restore power throughout New England," Yankee general manager Kevin Bronson told members of the media at the Friday afternoon press briefing.
"Whenever a fault occurs, the nearest breakers open up to protect the rest of the (energy) grid, and the breakers worked as planned," he said. "At no time was the plant or any of its safety systems at risk."
Bronson said that Yankee control room operators became aware of the situation at 4:11 p.m. on Thursday when buss voltage and relay alarms were triggered. Soon after, he said, plant workers were in touch with the Independent System Operator of New England's power grid. Working with ISO, Bronson said that the plant maintained a steady rate of 540 megawatts of power throughout the night in order to build a small "island" of power.
The energy was then channeled to Albany, N.Y., in order to help link up other power supply systems in that area.
During the outage, which affected large portions of New York, Massachusetts, Ohio and Connecticut, three nuclear power plants owned by Yankee's owner, Entergy, were forced to shut down due to the loss of off-site power. At about noon on Thursday, Entergy spokeswoman Kelle Barfield said that the New York City plants Indian Point 2 and Indian Point 3, as well as FitzPatrick near Syracuse, were able to shut down safely through the use of their own on-site diesel generators.
"There were no major problems or damage noted," she said.
At that time, the plants had not yet begun to send electricity back to New England's power grid, she added.
"But the restoration of offsite power has taken place," she said.
"We're ready to (send power), but we have to wait for word from our local ISO before going back on-line."
Bronson said that the design of the New England power grid protected Yankee from having to go offline like its neighbors in New York, but he stressed that VY would have been ready to do so if the outage had affected Vermont. Yankee is backed up by two diesel generators as well as a direct electricity line from the nearby Vernon dam.
"Had we needed to, we would have done the same thing," he said. "We can put the plant safely in shutdown condition until we can go back on the grid."
Bronson said that this week's outage, while not the first in the plant's 31-year history, is by far the largest to have taken place while the plant has been in operation.
"There's nothing of this significance in Vermont Yankee's history," he said. "We've seen significant load changes when a big plant has gone off-line, but that's not as large as this."
Vermont Yankee has been reliably supplying power in the Northeast for over 30 years. In addition to supplying Vermont with power during the blackout, the plant was able to support its neighbors by routing electricity to New York. During the outage Vermont Yankee’s automated and electronic systems were fully functioning, keeping the plant safe, secure, and reliable.
