The Tennessee Valley Authority began its scheduled refueling outage over the weekend at its oldest reactor at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant near Spring City.
An additional 1,000 TVA and contract employees are supplementing the site's regular staff during the outage. More than 11,500 work activities are planned, including loading new fuel assemblies, performing inspections of the unit's reactor equipment and steam generators, maintenance of plant equipment, and additional equipment upgrades before the reactor is brought back on line this fall.
The Unit 1 reactor at Watts Bar was taken off line Saturday after producing more than 13.6 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity during the past 18 months.
"Our work during the last outage allowed Watts Bar Unit 1 to continually generate safe, low-cost, carbon-free nuclear energy to reliably power daily life across the Tennessee Valley for nearly 500 days," said Paul Simmons, site vice president. "During this outage, we will continue focusing on safely upgrading and improving our plant systems to again deliver 18 months of safe, reliable service for our neighbors in the Valley."
Watts Bar is America's newest commercial nuclear power plant. Unit 1 was completed in 1996 , 23 years after construction began on the unit. The second reactor began power production in 2015.
Watt Bar's two units produce enough power for 1.3 million homes.