Dresden Generating Station begins scheduled refueling, maintenance

Exelon Corp. announced on Monday that the second unit at the Dresden Generating Station has been taken offline for regular maintenance and refueling activity.

The company said that approximately one-third of the fuel assemblies at the unit would be replaced and important repair, maintenance and evaluation work would take place during the outage.

“Refueling outages represent Exelon’s continued investment in the future of Dresden Station,” Site Vice President Shane Marik said. “Our top priority during the outage is performing the right work to keep the unit operating safely and reliably through the cold winter months and beyond.”

Exelon reported that there will be an additional 1,200 temporary workers alongside the site’s permanent staff of 850 people. Equipment at the facility will be updated or replaced as needed to ensure that the plant is operating safely and reliably.

The Dresden Generating Station houses two nuclear reactor units approximately 60 miles outside of Chicago that have a combined maximum generation capacity of approximately 1,800 megawatts of electricity. According to the company, this is enough to provide sufficient electricity to approximately 1.2 million average American residences.

The company did not specify when the facility is expected to return to service.