The Dow Jones Newswire reported April 4:

Entergy Corp. said it is making plans to restart one of its units at an Arkansas nuclear-power plant, a process that is expected to take several weeks, after the unit shut down automatically following an accident on Sunday that left one worker dead.

Entergy said both units at the Arkansas Nuclear One plant, located about 76 miles from Little Rock, remain in a stable, shutdown condition. The company is making plans to restart Unit 2 but said further evaluation will be needed for Unit 1, where damage evaluation, repair estimates and rescheduling the unit’s refueling activities will take more time.

On Sunday, a crane dropped a piece of an electric generator that weighed about 500 tons, damaging other equipment and a water pipeline, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Water seeped into an electrical component, causing a short-circuit that cut off power to the plant from the electric grid, according to Entergy and the NRC. Unit 2 shut down automatically, while Unit 1 had been shut down for maintenance, Entergy said.

Here’s a link: http://www.foxbusiness.com/news/2013/04/04/entergy-plans-for-restart-unit-2-at-arkansas-nuclear-plant/

Some incidents from this week’s NRC Event Reports page:

1. Unit 2 at the Arkansas Nuclear power plant shut down automatically from 100 per cent power Wednesday morning. The shutdown resulted from increased pressure in the Reactor Coolant System. According to this morning’s Reactor Status Report, the unit is back up to 31 per cent output.

2. The River Bend nuclear power plant in Louisiana sent a follow up report to the NRC this week, updating a December 2011 report concerning tritium in onsite test wells that exceeded EPA Safe Drinking Water standards. In the December incident, River Bend found tritium levels of 48,000 picocuries per liter, well over the EPA standard of 20,000 picocuries. The new results were staggering:

“On August 7, 2012, one of the six new groundwater monitoring wells installed near the monitoring well which yielded the positive results on December 20, 2011, produced a groundwater sample containing 432,733 picocuries per liter of tritium.”

Math’s not my strong suit, but isn’t that twenty times the EPA standard?

3. Yesterday morning, a non-licensed employee supervisor at the Quad Cities nuclear power plant in Illinois tested positive for alcohol in a Fitness for Duty test. This was a followup test after a previous incident involving that supervisor. The supervisor’s unescorted access to the facility has been terminated.

Here’s some items from today’s NRC Event Reports:

1. Yesterday evening, a fire broke out in ‘A’ Main Condensor at the Grand Gulf nuclear power plant in Mississippi. The on-site fire brigade was dispatched to fight the blaze and the area was evacuated. Because it took more than fifteen minutes to put out the fire, the plant was required to issue a Notice of Unusual Event. The fire brigade took slightly more than thirty minutes to put out the blaze, and the Unusual Event was terminated at 7 p.m. The plant’s sole reactor was shut down for refueling at the time of the incident. The cause of the fire is under investigation.

(If the square blue building in the center of the picture above looks familiar, it is once again a GE Mark 1 containment structure like the ones that failed at Fukushima. There are a couple of dozen of them in the United States.)

2. Earlier Wednesday, a non-licensed contract supervisor at the Turkey Point nuclear power plant in Florida tested positive for drugs in a random Fitness-for-Duty screening. The individual’s access to the plant has been terminated.

3. And on Wednesday afternoon, an emergency plan exercise at the Arkansas Nuclear power plant took an unexpected turn when a Little Rock television station ran the wrong message on its website. The message stated: “A site area emergency was declared Wednesday at Arkansas Nuclear One, Unit 1, today at 10:18 a.m. by Entergy Operations Inc. officials….”

Arkansas Nuclear reported to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this morning that recent engineering analysis showed that the Spent Fuel Handling Machine for the facility’s Unit 2 reactor did not meet seismic standards for a design basis earthquake. Arkansas Nuclear said that the data indicated “a lack of margin for several structural parts of the machine.”

The result: “The Spent Fuel Handling Machine (2H-3) is currently parked and de-energized in a safe position and administratively prohibited from being moved over any irradiated fuel assemblies in the spent fuel pool. Until further engineering evaluation or modifications can occur the Spent Fuel Handling Machine (2H-3) will remain in its current position and de-energized.”

Two unanswered questions remain: When is Unit 2 next scheduled for a refueling outage, and what happens if there is a need to retrieve anything from the Unit 2 fuel pool?