NRC Special Inspection: Robinson 2

No surprise to anyone with any smidgen of knowledge of the industry is the arrival of an NRC inspection team at Robinson-2 yesterday. This article, derived from the NRC release, is a good brief description.

As noted in our post in this blog on October 8, the combination of events at Robinson that resulted in two separate incident reports made to the NRC (one for the low-flow scram, another for the failure to isolate feed condition later on) was in sum somewhat alarming, and the NRC is on site. The inspection will run a week or so and the NRC will publish results on its site; we'll be watching.

H.B. Robinson Steam Electric Plant Unit #2 is a Westinghouse three-loop Pressurized Water Reactor. The construction permit for the plant was issued in 1967; the operating license was issued in 1970 and the plant went on line producing power for Carolina Power & Light in March, 1971. Robinson 2's rating by NRC records is 2339 MWt and 710 MWe. (For those new, let's refresh: "MWt" is Megawatts Thermal, or heat output from the reactor in megawatts, while "MWe" is the net electrical power output in megawatts to the supply lines or "grid.")