The Tennessee Valley Authority began a scheduled refueling and maintenance outage over the weekend at the Unit 1 reactor at the Sequoyah Nuclear Power Plant.
The refueling comes after the reactor produced more than 13.6 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity over the past 18 months, including one period of 474 consecutive days of full power operation.
“Outages create different kinds of tasks for the team but our focus remains exactly the same performing each job safely and with the highest levels of quality,” John Carlin, Seqouyah’s site vice president, said in a statement today. “Unit 2 will remain online during the Unit 1 outage, so all activities are carefully coordinated to maintain public and employee safety.”
An additional 950 TVA and contract employees will supplement the site’s regular staff during the outage, which began Saturday. More than 12,000 work activities are planned, including loading new fuel assemblies, performing inspections of reactor components, maintaining plant equipment and installing unit enhancements.
“We intend to take full advantage of this opportunity to improve the reliability of the plant,” Carlin said.
At full capacity, Sequoyah’s two generating units provide a combined 2,200 megawatts of electricity, which can power 1.3 million homes.