The Tennessee Valley Authority restarted its Unit 1 reactor at its Watts Bar Nuclear Plant on Tuesday after refueling the reactor to generate power for the next 18 months.
TVA said it replaced 80 of the 193 fuel assemblies in the reactor and completed 10,000 work activities and equipment inspections during the outage, which added 800 TVA and contract personnel at the Spring City, Tenn., plant over the past month.
"The work we performed in this outage puts Unit 1 in the best position to continue to safely generate carbon-free, low-cost energy around the clock," said Watts Bar Site Vice President Paul Simmons.
TVA spokesman Jim Hopson said it should take several days of power ascension testing to gradually bring the 1,150-megawatt unit up to full power.
The newest reactor at Watts Bar, which became a commercial unit last October, remains offline while workers work to assess and prepare a ruptured condenser that broke apart when support beams failed at the reactor on March 23. TVA expects the $5 billion unit to be offline until later this summer because of the difficulty of replacing and repairing the condenser equipment in the tight quarters on the non-nuclear side of the plant.
The heat exchanger, or condenser, turns steam generated within the reactor back into water. TVA President Bill Johnson said last week the equipment could not be checked for reliability during the prolonged construction of Watts Bar Unit 2, which began in 1974 and was completed last year.
At full capacity, Watts Bar's two units produce more than 2,300 megawatts of electricity, or enough power for 1.3 million average homes.