More than 1,200 extra workers are now on site at the Cook nuclear power plant in Bridgman for Unit 2’s 28th refueling outage.
Cook plant spokesperson Bill Downey tells us the crews will be performing 9,000 total jobs at the facility in the coming weeks, and while they’re in town they serve as an economic boost just as the tourist season is ending.
But who are the workers? Downey says many are contractors.
“A lot of them come from our local union houses, and then there are others who are kind of journeyman craft workers that travel around the country from outage to outage,” Downey said. “They make a living at this.”
Downey says they’re the real nuclear professionals who know what to do and get right to it.
“It’s a very, very interesting lifestyle. I mean, some people really love it. And particularly there’s people that love to work the back shift, working those night shift hours. And that’s why, when we have outages, a lot of our local pubs will serve the night shift. So it’s very interesting. It’s very lucrative for our businesses.”
Some of the extra staff started arriving at the plant a few months ago to do pre-outage work. Downey says their presence in the area helps hotels, B&Bs, restaurants, stores, and entertainment venues. He tells us the road reconstruction project on Red Arrow Highway outside of the plant isn’t proving to be much of a problem for the crews as they come and go.
Among other things, the refueling outage is being used for equipment replacements in the control room, diesel generator inverter replacements, an upgrade to the reactor coolant pump vibration monitoring system, and inspection and maintenance of the turbines and and rotors.
