Indiana Michigan Power has announced their Cook Nuclear Plant Unit 2 is starting its 27th refueling outage this Saturday, March 23. The power on Unit 2 was reduced Wednesday to allow for testing before the outage.
Spokesman Bill Downey with Cook Nuclear says among the more than 12,000 different activities to complete during the refueling is replacing a 6,000 horsepower reactor cooling pump that weighs more than 76,000 pounds.
“So we’ve got to get it disassembled down there. We’ve got to get a crew in, we’ve got lifting and rigging and we’ve got to haul that thing out, put it on basically a sled system that slides it out of our containment hatch, and then we put the new one in, slide it back in and drop it back down. It’s quite an operation.”
Downey says the unit will have operated for more than 12-thousand hours during its last cycle at better than 99 percent capacity, generating more than 14-million megawatt-hours of electricity. The refueling outage also brings a lot of outside workers – about 1,000 people with specialized expertise.
“The hotels are filled up. We’ve got a lot of rental properties that people (use). And it’s not just for the refueling outage. It’s not like they came in last week. There are a lot of pre-outage activities that take place. So a lot of these folks started trickling in (during) mid to late summer.”
Cook Unit 1 remains at 100 percent. Power to customers is not expected to be disrupted by the planned Unit 2 outage. AEP does not provide a return to service date, they say, for competitive reasons.
