Exelon idles New Jersey's Oyster Creek nuclear plant (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Reuters) ? Exelon Corp said on Saturday it took offline its Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in New Jersey as a precautionary measure as Hurricane Irene bore down on the U.S. East Coast.

The reactor, which has a 636 megawatt capacity, enough power for 600,000 homes, was taken offline at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT), according to Marshall Murphy, Director of nuclear communications at Exelon.

"It's really as a precaution, a conservative action because we do expect hurricane force winds," Murphy said.

The plant previously reduced reactor power to prepare for a possible shutdown.

Murphy said the duration of the outage will be short.

(Reporting by Joshua Schneyer and Selam Gebrekidan)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/environment/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110827/us_nm/us_storm_irene_exelon

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