The refueling outage of Unit 1 at the Cook nuclear power has been completed.
Cook plant spokesperson Bill Downey tells us Unit 1 was reconnected to the transmission grid at about 11 p.m. Wednesday after a 32 day outage. That’s a relatively short refueling outage as Downey says much of the maintenance done was routine. But there were a few key projects done.
“One of the things that we did is we took apart one of our low pressure turbines to do some inspections, and that’s hundreds and hundreds of tons of equipment that had to get lifted and moved and disassembled and inspected and reassembled, and this is just one project,” Downey said. “Then it had to be put together so that our main turbine would be able to spin again at 1,800 rpm, over 400 miles per hour at micrometer tolerances.”
Downey says about 1,000 additional workers were brought in to conduct maintenance during the refueling outages. Local restaurants, hotels, and stores all benefitted from having them in town.
Also, Downey says something new this year was the presence of food trucks at the plant. Some were even there late at night for hungry workers on break.
Unit 1 is now being gradually returned to full power. The next refueling outage will be for Unit 2 in the spring.
