FirstEnergy Says It’s Fixing a Leak at Ohio Reactor

(Corrects comment from NRC in last paragraph of story published June 7 on whether the leak must be reported.)

FirstEnergy Corp. (FE) is repairing a leak discovered June 6 as it restarted Davis-Besse nuclear station in Ohio following a refueling outage, a company spokeswoman said.

FirstEnergy can’t say for competitive reasons when it expects to complete the repair to the reactor’s coolant system or when the 913-megawatt unit will come online, Jennifer Young, a spokeswoman for the Akron, Ohio-based company said in a telephone phone interview today.

The amount of radioactive water that sprayed through the pinhole-sized leak was “relatively small” and no radiation was discharged from the plant, Young said.

Because the leak was from a pressure boundary in a system that contains the reactor and radioactive coolant, the company was required to report the incident to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“When the leak was identified as coming from a pressure boundary, the plant was required to report it to the NRC, shut the plant down and fix it,” Viktoria Mitlyng, a spokeswoman for the agency in Lisle, Illinois, said in an e-mailed statement.

To contact the reporters on this story: Katarzyna Klimasinska in Washington at kklimasinska@bloomberg.net; Julie Johnsson in Chicago at jjohnsson@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Susan Warren at susanwarren@bloomberg.net