Feds to Inspect to Arizona Nuclear Plant

Jun 16 - United Press International

Federal regulators plan a closer look at the emergency shutdown of a major Arizona nuclear power plant earlier this week.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said late Tuesday it was sending one of its Augmented Inspection Teams to the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station to see why one of the emergency backup generators failed to kick in Monday when the plant's outside power source failed.

The incident caused the plant to shut down automatically and caused a series of scattered outages in the Phoenix area and as far away as San Jose, Calif.

The NRC said the problem did not pose a threat; however, the backup diesel generators supply electricity to the plant's safety systems and officials are concerned one of the generators failed to start up automatically.

The investigation was expected to take about 30 days to complete.