More than 2,100 TVA employees and contractors have started to install new equipment to boost the power output at the utility’s oldest nuclear power plant by more than 14 percent.
Following a record-long 653-day run of power generation at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant, TVA idled the Unit 3 reactor at Browns Ferry over the holiday weekend and started Saturday to install equipment to add another 155 megawatts of generating power from the boiling water reactor.
Similar upgrades are planned on the two other units at Browns Ferry as part of a $475 million program to boost overall power by 465 megawatts by the spring of 2019.
TVA’s Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant near Athens, Ala., includes three boiling water reactors. TVA is spending $475 million to upgrade the units to generate another 465 megawatts, or 155 megawatts per reactor.The extra power from the Extended Power Uprate, or EPU, is projected to produce enough additional electricity to power 280,000 more homes and will help TVA boost the share of power it gets from its nuclear power plants to 40 percent.
The power upgrade is far less costly than building new nuclear generation. TVA spent $4.7 billion to add a 1,200 megawatt Unit 2 reactor at Watts Bar in 2016 – or more than $3.9 million per installed megawatt – compared with only $1.02 million per megawatt for the upgraded Browns Ferry units. At Plant Vogtle in Georgia, the new AP1000 reactors are projected to cost more than $6.4 million per megawatt.