Motel rooms will be a little harder to come by in the region for the next couple of months as another refueling outage beginning just after midnight on Thursday morning will result in near two thousand additional temporary workers flooding the local market to accomplish the important tasks associated with the outage.
Indiana Michigan Power’s Cook Nuclear Plant Unit 2 will begin its twenty-third refueling outage Thursday at 12:01 am. Power was reduced to 50-percent for that unit back on Monday evening in order to accomplish equipment testing prior to the outage. The unit will have operated for 423 consecutive days at a capacity factor of 97.9-percent, generating 12,014,813 megawatt-hours of electricity.
Running continuously between refueling outages is known in the industry as a breaker-to-breaker run as the unit’s output circuit breakers remained connected to the transmission grid for the entire 18-month fuel cycle. Meanwhile, Cook Unit 1 remains at 100-percent power, and also ran breaker-to-breaker before refueling last fall.
Shane Lies is Site Vice President at the Cook Plant near Bridgman. He says, “We are pleased that both units have been running well.” Lies adds, “We are doing the right maintenance to keep the units reliable today, while also implementing our Life Cycle Management upgrades so as to keep the units safe and reliable for many years to come.”
In addition to refueling the reactor and performing regular maintenance and testing work, the outage will be extended due to inspection and replacement of more of the unit’s baffle bolts, which support internal components of the reactor vessel. Specific outage duration is considered proprietary information, and is therefore not publicly disclosed by the plant.
About 1,800 contracted workers will supplement the regular 1,100-person plant staff leading up to and during the outage. More than 12,000 maintenance, inspection and equipment modification job activities totaling 325,000 work-hours are scheduled for two daily 12-hour work shifts.
At full capacity, the 1,084-net MW Unit 1 and 1,194-net MW Unit 2 combined produce enough electricity for more than one and one half million average homes.
Indiana Michigan Power is a wholly owned subsidiary of American Electric Power.
