Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Two nuclear plants shut down: eight million left without power

More than 8.1 million homes and businesses were left without electric power across the eastern United States Tuesday with superstorm Sandy still moving across the region, the US government said. The most extensive outages were reported in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania where millions were plunged into darkness by the storm, the US Department of Energy said.

"As of 9:00 am EDT October 30, the impacted states report a total of 8,114,433 customers without power in the affected areas," it said. New Jersey was hardest hit with 2.5 million outages, New York 1.96 million, and Pennsylvania 1.26 million. In all, 17 states and the District of Columbia reported storm-related outages. Meanwhile, two US nuclear power plants were shut down early Tuesday in the aftermath of superstorm Sandy, but the plant operators stressed there were no risks to the public. New Jersey's main power company PSEG Nuclear shut down its Salem 1 unit on the Delaware river, saying most of its water circulation pumps had been rendered unusable "due to weather impacts".

PSEG said it manually shut down the 1,175 MW unit, but said there were "no issues" in the shutdown and the facility was "currently stable." The Salem 2 unit was already offline for maintenance when the storm hit, and PSEG said another nearby nuclear unit, Hope Creek, remains operating at full power.

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