Warning system involving five nuclear plants failed, including one in SC
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is looking into the temporary failure of a Dominion Energy emergency response system at five nuclear power plants, including the V.C. Summer station northwest of Columbia.
Late on June 26, operators at plants in South Carolina, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Virginia learned that Dominion’s automated Everbridge emergency notification system had experienced an outage.
“This event constitutes a major loss of offsite communications capability,’’ according to NRC notices involving the five plants.
The Everbridge system helps notify emergency response personnel if a nuclear plant needs to go into an emergency mode, agency spokesman Dave Gasperson said in an email Monday, June 29. Dominion characterized the system as a “third party communications platform’’ it uses to notify employees and “response organizations’’ during emergencies.
Gasperson said it’s important that nuclear plants be able to contact state and local emergency response agencies “if plant conditions could require public protective actions.’’
Despite the problem, Dominion has other ways of making notifications to employees and first responders through backup systems, the NRC said. But Gasperson said the Everbridge system allows notifications to be made quickly.
The agency did not say what caused the problem, but Gasperson and Dominion spokesman Matt Long said the glitch has been fixed since Friday night.
“There was no impact to the health and safety of the public or our plant personnel during this event,’’ according to an email from Long.
Tom Clements, a longtime environmentalist and outspoken nuclear critic, said the issue is nonetheless worth paying attention to.
“Although losing communication doesn’t mean there is a risk of any kind of accident in the operation, it did appear to me that, if something did happen, not having communication ability would hamper the communication between the key elements of the accident response plan,’’ he said.
Plants that were affected by the outage, in addition to the V.C. Summer facility in South Carolina are Millstone in Connecticut; North Anna and Surry in Virginia, and Susquehanna in Pennsylvania, according to June 29 NRC event notification reports.
The NRC’s resident inspectors have been notified and “we will review the licensee’s follow up and any corrective actions through our normal inspection process.,’’ Gasperson said.
Dominion, a major energy company headquartered in Virginia, has a fleet of nuclear plants, including the Summer facility in South Carolina. The V.C. Summer site has a single reactor that was licensed in the 1980s. Plans are underway by another company, Santee Cooper, to revive the failed project that would have added two reactors near the existing generating facility. .
This story was originally published June 30, 2026 at 11:03 AM.
