Operators will slowly increase power over the next several days until the plant is operating at 100 percent power. This was Fermi 2’s 18th refueling outage.
During the outage, workers replaced a third of the fuel in the reactor and completed thousands of maintenance and testing activities to ensure the continued safe, reliable operation of the plant. A refueling and maintenance outage is performed every 18 months at Fermi 2.
Fermi 2 Site Vice President Keith Polson praised plant employees for completing the outage on schedule and for achieving several other key goals, including the safety goal of zero OSHA-recordable injuries.
“A refueling outage at a nuclear power plant is an enormous undertaking,” he said. “More than 13,000 activities were completed in just 33 days. This is the result of careful planning over the last 18 months and great focus and execution by more than 2,000 workers over the last month. Most important, we were able to accomplish this without a single significant injury,” Polson said.
The plant hired an additional 1,200 workers, many from local trades groups, to complement DTE’s 850 full time workers. The crews worked around the clock to complete the work, always focused on the goal of making the plant as safe and efficient as possible for the customers of southeast Michigan.
Fermi 2, a 1,170-megawatt nuclear power plant, is owned and operated by DTE Energy.
