The Clinton Power Station is located 23 miles southeast of Bloomington, Illinois and has one General Electric boiling water reactor with a Mark III containment that began operating in 1987.
In December 2017, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) dispatched a Special Inspection Team to the plant to investigate a transformer failure that prompted the operators to manually scram the reactor. That event nearly duplicated a transformer failure/manual scram event that happened at Clinton in December 2013.
The ink had scarcely dried on the NRC’s special inspection report when Clinton experienced yet another electrical power problem. Some progress has been made—this time it did not involve a transformer failure causing the reactor to be shut down. This time, the reactor was already shut down when the power problem began. This time, the failures involved several workers over several days failing to follow several procedures to disable an emergency power supply. This time as in the past, the NRC dispatched a special inspection team to figure out what when wrong. Read more >