News and Music Discovery
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

'Maintenance Glitch' To Blame For Temporary Shutdown at Paducah Nuclear Site

PGDP Department of Energy

  Power has been restored to the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant after it was forced to temporarily shut down for several hours Tuesday due to a maintenance issue.

According to the Department of Energy’s Yvette Cantrell it is the first time the plant has completely shut down since it stopped uranium production operations in 2013.

 

Electrical power comes into the plant through transmission lines from TVA’s Shawnee Steam Plant and Electric Energy (EEI) at Joppa, Illinois.  Cantrell said since the plant is in its decommission phase it has gone from 4 power lines to one.

“One of our partners today had a malfunction today in one of the lines. It created a type of domino effect and made the other line go down, so we were without power until they could get the lines fixed.” Cantrell said.

Cantrell said the power outage did not affect clean-up operations. The Paducah site employs an average of 1,500 people.

Tags
Nicole Erwin is a Murray native and started working at WKMS during her time at Murray State University as a Psychology undergraduate student. Nicole left her job as a PTL dispatcher to join the newsroom after she was hired by former News Director Bryan Bartlett. Since, Nicole has completed a Masters in Sustainable Development from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia where she lived for 2 1/2 years.
Related Content