FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company (FENOC) has resumed operations of unit 1 at the Beaver Valley Power Station in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, US following completion of refueling and maintenance outage.
Image: Picture of Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Plant. Photo courtesy of United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission/Wikipedia.
The 25-day outage is the shortest refueling outage in Beaver Valley Unit 1’s 42 years of operation. The unit’s previous refueling outage record was 27 days, set in 2004.
The 939-megawatt plant is currently operating at approximately 30 percent power. Power levels will vary over the next several days as the plant ramps up to full power.
While the unit was shut down, approximately one-third of the unit’s 157 fuel assemblies were exchanged. In addition, more than 6,300 work activities associated with numerous inspections, preventive maintenance and improvement projects were completed, including examinations of various transformers, pumps, valves, the reactor vessel and the cooling tower.
“Beaver Valley Unit 1’s safe and efficient outage performance is a credit to the teamwork and commitment of the plant employees and more than 1,000 temporary workers who assisted with the outage,” said FENOC Chief Operating Officer Paul Harden. “The record outage at Beaver Valley follows a best-ever outage at Davis-Besse earlier this year and at Perry last year, demonstrating that our employees are rising to the challenge of delivering the best performance and clean, reliable, affordable and secure electricity.”
Source: Company Press Release