Workers exit the turbine building at Watts Bar Nuclear Plant.
This sign denotes the direction to the power units at Watts Bar Nuclear Plant.
Both reactors at TVA’s newest nuclear power plant are shut down after plant operators idled one unit for routine refueling Saturday and shut down the other unit Monday after detecting problems in the pumps on the non-nuclear part of the plant.
The shutdown of the two 1,150-megawatt reactors has cut enough power to supply 1.3 million homes in the Tennessee Valley.
TVA still has plenty of power capacity from its other power plants, especially with this week’s mild springtime temperatures. But the shutdown costs TVA more than $1 million a day to replace the lost generation.
The shutdown of the Unit 1 reactor for refueling has brought an extra 800 temporary contract workers and TVA employees to the plant near Spring City, Tenn., for the next month to perform maintenance work and refuel the Unit 1 reactor. Nuclear plants are typically refueled about every 18 months and plant operators use such outages to replace parts, inspect equipment and perform other maintenance tasks that can’t be done when the unit is operating.
Two days after TVA shut down the oldest reactor and began the refueling work Saturday, the newest reactor at Watts Bar also was shut down Monday morning after plant operators detected problems in the pumps that supply water to the steam generators in the turbine building outside of the nuclear reactor for Unit 2.