Shearon Harris nuclear plant shuts down

Progress Energy's Shearon Harris nuclear plant unexpectedly shut down today at about 10 a.m., its first unplanned outage in more than a year.

The nuclear plant, about 25 miles southwest of Raleigh, turned itself off automatically when the plant’s generator short-circuited.

Plant personnel are trying to determine the cause of the malfunction and expect to have the plant operational again by Wednesday, said spokeswoman Julie Hans.

During the outage, the company also plans to fix a leaky valve in a cooling pump that would feed water to the reactor during an emergency, she said.

Nuclear plants are designed to shut down automatically under certain circumstances as a safety precaution. Most outages are quickly corrected and aren't considered dangerous.

The previous unplanned outage at Shearon Harris was in May 2004, lasting 14 days. The reactor was taken offline for refueling in March, a planned outage that lasted 37 days.