More than 8.1 million homes and businesses were left without electric power across the eastern United States Tuesday with superstorm Sandy still moving across the region, the US government said. The most extensive outages were reported in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania where millions were plunged into darkness by the storm, the US Department of Energy said.
"As of 9:00 am EDT October 30, the impacted states report a total of 8,114,433 customers without power in the affected areas," it said. New Jersey was hardest hit with 2.5 million outages, New York 1.96 million, and Pennsylvania 1.26 million. In all, 17 states and the District of Columbia reported storm-related outages. Meanwhile, two US nuclear power plants were shut down early Tuesday in the aftermath of superstorm Sandy, but the plant operators stressed there were no risks to the public. New Jersey's main power company PSEG Nuclear shut down its Salem 1 unit on the Delaware river, saying most of its water circulation pumps had been rendered unusable "due to weather impacts".
PSEG said it manually shut down the 1,175 MW unit, but said there were "no issues" in the shutdown and the facility was "currently stable." The Salem 2 unit was already offline for maintenance when the storm hit, and PSEG said another nearby nuclear unit, Hope Creek, remains operating at full power.
In New York, power generator Entergy shut down a unit of its Indian Point nuclear facility "due to external electrical grid issues." Another unit remained at full power, and Entergy said on Twitter that there was "no risk" to the public or company employees.
Late Monday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it was monitoring all plants in the US north-east as Sandy pushed up water levels in rivers and bays, which are crucial for cooling operations at the facilities. The Oyster Creek plant in New Jersey, which was in a regularly scheduled outage when the storm hit, set off an alert when floodwaters exceeded a threshold set for its water intake facilities.
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