The Pacific Northwest’s only commercial nuclear power plant, Columbia Generating Station, has been reconnected to the grid and returned to full power. Its comeback coincided with a cold snap across Washington state. The plant, located about 30 kilometers north of Richland, can supply electricity around the clock to roughly one million homes.
An unexpected outage that lasted six days beginning Feb. 12 did not lead to consumer supply interruptions. The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), a federal agency within the U.S. Department of Energy that manages the sale of electricity from federal hydroelectric dams and supports grid reliability in the Northwest, compensated for the plant’s absence using the region’s hydroelectric capacity and operational flexibility. The shutdown was caused by a failure of the circulation pumps, which required a safe, controlled reactor shutdown.
Energy Northwest staff found the fault in a small component — an electronic filter in the system that cools the equipment controlling the circulation pumps. Those pumps supply water to the reactor’s core, where it turns to steam that spins the generator’s turbines. After repairing the component, technicians performed comprehensive testing of the equipment to verify its operability.
Energy Northwest’s chief nuclear officer, Don Cilio, emphasized that safety and operational excellence remained the priorities at every stage of the work. The 1,207-megawatt Columbia Generating Station is the third-largest power generator in Washington state after the Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph dams. Those giant hydroelectric plants on the Columbia River, the largest in the U.S., provide huge amounts of low-cost renewable electricity, forming the backbone of the region’s grid and supporting its energy security. The last unplanned shutdown at the plant not related to a scheduled refueling outage occurred in May 2018, underscoring its overall reliability.
Based on: Northwest’s only commercial nuclear power plant back online after repair