The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) said on Monday that the second unit of its Sequoyah Nuclear Plant began a scheduled maintenance and refueling outage on Saturday.
The company said new fuel assemblies will be installed and in-depth inspections and maintenance activities are set to take place. TVA said approximately 10,000 operations will be carried out during the outage, which will necessitate an additional 700 contracted workers and TVA staff at the facility.
“Beyond loading new fuel, outages like this are vital to continuing nuclear power’s role as a key supplier of reliable, low-cost electricity to those we serve in the Tennessee Valley,” John Carlin, site vice president, said. “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.”
TVA said that over the past 18 months, the unit produced approximately 13.6 billion kilowatt hours of electricity. Regular refueling and maintenance outages are carried out to ensure that a nuclear reactor is operating at full safety and technical levels.
TVA owns and operates six nuclear reactors in the Tennessee Valley.
