After generating more than 13.5 billion kilowatt hours electricity over the past 18 months, the Tennessee Valley Authority began a scheduled refueling outage today on the Unit 2 reactor at its Sequoyah Nuclear Plant near Soddy Daisy.
TVA is bringing in an extra 700 utility and contract workers during the maintenance outage over the next several weeks. About 10,000 work activities are planned, including loading new fuel assemblies, performing inspections of reactor components, maintenance of plant equipment and installing unit enhancements.
"Outages like this are vital to continuing nuclear power's role as a key supplier of reliable, low-cost, clean electricity to those we serve in the Tennessee Valley," said Tony Williams, Sequoyah''s site vice president. "In addition to loading new fuel, some key maintenance activities can only be safely completed when we are offline, so we will make the most of this opportunity to ensure Unit 2 operates safely and reliably for another 18 months."
Sequoyah Unit 2 is one of seven operational TVA nuclear reactors in Tennessee and Alabama which collectively supply about one third of TVA's power.
TVA will lose a key power generator as temperatures Saturday are expected to rise into the upper 80s across much of TVA's 7-state region. But springtime power demand is still usually much lower than the power peaks TVA reaches during the coldest winter months of December, January and February or the hottest months of the summer in June, July and August.
This summer, for the first time, TVA also will have the benefit of two reactors at its Watts Bar Nuclear Plant near Spring City. TVA added Watts Bar Unit 2 as a commercial power plant last September.