Effective Tuesday at 6:49 p.m., operations were shut down at the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant.
The plant is located on the Lake Michigan shoreline in Van Buren County, in Covert Township.
The plant was shut down to repair a "small leak" in the plant's safety injection and refueling water tank.
According to Palisades communications personnel, the large tank holds around 300,000 gallons of borated water that is the source for flooding up the reactor cavity during refueling outages. It is also the source for the safety injection system to remove heat from the reactor’s core for extended time periods due to a loss of coolant.
The Palisades operations department claims they have been monitoring, collecting and analyzing tank leakage twice every 24 hours over the past several days.
At 1:41 p.m. Tuesday, the tank was declared inoperable because the leakage had surpassed established safety limits.
According to plant supervisors, repair work will include draining the tank, locating the leak, repairing the leak, refilling the tank and returning the plant to service.
The plant was shut down and also underwent repairs back in April, story here.
Historically, the plant has been scrutinized for safety reasons. See related stories for more.
