Unit 2 of the Cook nuclear power plant is now back online after a 35-day refueling outage.
Cook plant spokesperson Joe Calahan tells us Unit 2 was powered back on and reconnected to the grid shortly after 2 a.m. on Saturday. During the outage, around 1,200 additional staff members were on site to not only refuel the reactor, but also to perform about 9,000 maintenance, inspection, and equipment jobs totaling 188,000 workhours.
One of the major projects was the replacement of control room instrument distribution inverters.
“There’s four of them per unit,” Callahan said. “These cabinets supply vital power to our control room instrumentation. They have the ability to supply normal power and backup power in case the normal power supply is lost, really to ensure that we have continuous power in our control room.”
Callahan says other tasks included emergency diesel generator inverter replacements, and an upgrade to the reactor coolant pump.
All of the extra staff in town for the outage these past six weeks gave a boost to hotels in the area.
“Hotels, a lot of them do Airbnbs. There’s some bed and breakfast type places as well. A lot of people have rentals, a lot of short-term rentals. So yeah, they started coming in here around probably middle of August.”
That’s a lot of business for stores and restaurants throughout the outage. Many of the extra staff members are contractors who travel around doing such work at nuclear plants all over the country.
Callahan says now that Unit 2 is back online, the next refueling outage will be with Unit 1 sometime next year. Unit 1 remained at 100% power throughout the outage, serving the facility’s generation needs.
