News Archive 2003

Non-nuclear fire shuts Indian Point 3
By JIM FITZGERALD
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
April 29, 2003

BUCHANAN — A fire broke out early this morning in a non-nuclear section of the Indian Point 3 power plant, forcing the shutdown of the reactor, a spokesman for the plant's owner said.

The cause was unknown but there were no signs of sabotage or terrorist acts, said Jim Steets of Entergy Corp. Since the terror attacks of 2001, many area residents have focused their fears on the Indian Point complex as a potential target.

The other plant on the site in Westchester County, Indian Point 2, was already out of service, having shut down automatically because of an offsite electrical outage Monday evening. The twin shutdowns completely remove Indian Point, the region's top producer of electrical energy, from the power grid.

When the fire was discovered around 3 a.m., Indian Point 3 was operating at 60 percent of capacity as it came back up from a planned refueling outage. It was shut down at 3:03 a.m., Steets said. At 3:13 a.m., the fire was classified as an "unusual event," the lowest of four levels of alert on a scale used by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The fire, in the insulation around piping for the main steam generator, was extinguished by plant workers at 3:50 a.m. and the "unusual event" classification was canceled at 5:21 a.m., Steets said.

He said there were no injuries. Damage was visible on part of the turbine as well as the insulation, Steets said.

He said he did not know how long it would take for the plant to resume operations.
"We're not going to bring it back until we understand the cause of the fire and check out all the equipment," he said. Indian Point 3 has had an excellent safety record in recent years.

Indian Point 2, which has a more troubled history, shut down on its own, "as it's designed to do," when the electrical outage hit the area at about 5 p.m. Monday, Steets said. Con Edison said the power failure was caused when feeder cables malfunctioned at substations in Buchanan, Ossining and Millwood. About 51,000 customers were without power for several minutes.

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