Just in time for the upcoming Memorial Day unofficial start to summer in Michigan’s Great Southwest, there will be a little more room at the inn following the completion today of the Cook Nuclear Plant’s refueling outage at Unit 2 in Bridgman.
The additional space at the inn is being made by the departure of nearly 900 contract workers who came in to join the regular 1,000 person staff at the Cook Plant to undertake the refueling tasks which concluded when Unit 2 was reconnected to the transmission grid at 1:08pm this afternoon, Thursday, May 20th.
That reconnection completes the 33-day long outage at Indiana Michigan Power Company’s Cook Plant along Red Arrow Highway on the shores of Lake Michigan.
In addition to refueling the reactor and performing regular maintenance and testing work, the outage also included:
- An inspection of the reactor vessel’s lower support column
- Improvements to numerous air-operated valve actuators
- A fire detection system upgrade
- A project to install improved video display units in the Control Room for the plant’s operators
Nearly 900 contracted workers supplemented the regular 1,000-person plant staff leading up to and during the outage. More than 10,470 maintenance, inspection and equipment modification job activities totaling 155,000 work-hours were completed during two daily 12-hour work shifts over the course of the outage.
Joel Gebbie, American Electric Power’s (AEP) Senior Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer says, “As with our fall 2020 refueling outage for Cook Unit 1, we once again took care to maintain the rigorous COVID-19 protocols we incorporated into our on-site work routine over the last year,” and notes, “With the health and safety of our workers and the public being our top concern in everything we do, we were pleased that we were successful with that effort, as well as the efforts to refuel and maintain Unit 2 for future reliability.”
Prior to the start of the outage, Cook Unit 2 operated for 11,987.55 hours during its last cycle at a capacity factor of 98.3-percent, generating 14,181,471 megawatt-hours (MWe) of electricity.
The Cook Nuclear Plant is owned and operated by I&M, an AEP company, headquartered in Fort Wayne, Indiana. 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. I&M and its approximately 2,100 employees serve more than 599,000 customers. More than two-thirds of its energy delivered in 2019 was emission-free. I&M has at its availability various sources of generation including 2,278 MW of nuclear generation in Michigan, 450 MW of purchased wind generation from Indiana, more than 22 MW of hydro generation in both states and approximately 15 MW of large-scale solar generation in both states. The company’s generation portfolio also includes 2,620 MW of coal-fueled generation in Indiana.
