Byron plant generating electricity after shutdown

BYRON (AP) – A northern Illinois nuclear plant is back up and running after a reactor lost power and shut down last week.

Exelon Nuclear says the Unit 2 reactor at the Byron Generating Station began producing electricity at about noon Tuesday after it was reconnected to the electrical grid.

An outage on Jan. 30 started when an electrical insulator failed and fell off the metal structure to which it was attached. That interrupted power and caused the reactor automatically to shut down as a precaution.

Exelon says technical experts conducted hundreds of maintenance and inspection tasks while the unit was offline.

The Byron Generating Station is about 95 miles northwest of Chicago.