BUCHANAN, N.Y. (AP) -- A fire early Tuesday damaged equipment in a non-nuclear section of the Indian Point 3 power plant and forced the shutdown of the reactor, a spokesman said.
The cause was unknown but there were no signs of sabotage or terrorist acts, and no radioactive material was released, said Jim Steets of Entergy Corp., the plant's owner.
The other plant on the site, Indian Point 2, was already out of service, having shut down automatically because of an unrelated electrical outage Monday evening. The twin shutdowns completely remove Indian Point, the region's top producer of electrical energy, from the power grid.
Since the terror attacks of 2001, many people living nearby have focused their fears on the Indian Point complex, 35 miles north of midtown Manhattan, as a possible target. Critics who want the two plants shut down say the densely populated area could not be protected if radiation were released in a major accident or attack.
The fire was classified as an ``unusual event,'' the lowest of four levels of alert on a scale used by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Indian Point 3 was shut down within minutes after the fire was discovered in the insulation around piping for the main steam-powered turbine around 3 a.m. The fire was extinguished within the hour and no one was injured.
Damage was visible on part of the turbine as well as the insulation, Steets said. He did not know how long it would take for the plant to resume operations.
``We're not going to bring it back until we understand the cause of the fire and check out all the equipment,'' he said.
Indian Point 2 shut down ``as it's designed to do'' when the electrical outage occurred outside the plant at about 5 p.m. Monday, Steets said. Con Edison said the power failure, which lasted several minutes and affected 51,000 customers, happened when feeder cables malfunctioned.
