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(Reuters) – Duke Energy Corp said Monday that its Braunschweig nuclear plant in North Carolina had been safely closed despite limited road access to the site due to floods caused by storm Florence.
The remains of Florence, which landed Friday as a hurricane, continue to rain heavy rains on Carolinas already saturated.
Mary Kathryn Green, spokeswoman for Duke, said there was road access to the Brunswick site, but that it was "limited access". She said that there were about 300 people at the factory. There are usually more than 900 workers.
Over the weekend, Duke said on-site conditions prevented plant staff from accessing the site through personal vehicles due to flooding of local roads.
An unusual event is the lowest of the NRC emergency rankings.
Joey Ledford, a spokesman for the NRC regional office in Atlanta, said the company had released the report because the regulations and plant procedures required multiple ground routes to the factory.
Ledford stated that Brunswick had never lost access to off-site energy and that there was no flooding at the plant, located approximately 6.1 meters above the water level. sea.
Duke began Thursday shutting down the two reactors of the 1,870-megawatt power plant before the storm hits the coast. A megawatt can power about 1,000 American households.
Brunswick is located about six kilometers (6.4 km) from the coast, near the town of Southport, about 30 miles south of Wilmington, North Carolina.
Nuclear power plants have procedures that require them to obtain sufficient safety time before the winds of a hurricane force reach the site.
The plant's two reactors, which were commissioned in 1975 and 1977, are similar in design to some damaged reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan after an earthquake and tsunami in 2011.
Since Fukushima, all US reactors have been upgraded with additional safety equipment, including pumps and portable generators to allow cooling water to flow into the reactor in case the plant is no longer powered.
Separately, Duke said on Saturday that he had released rainwater that could have come in contact with coal ash from a landfill at Sutton's Wilmington Generating Station.
(Report by Scott DiSavino, edited by Rosalba O & # 39; Brien)
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