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.