A refueling outage is about to begin at the Cook nuclear power plant.
Plant spokesperson Bill Downey tells us Unit 1 will be taken offline at 3 a.m. on Saturday for both refueling and maintenance. The work will include replacing a Reactor Coolant Pump motor, as well as RCP seal inspection and refurbishment activities.
Downey says some of this will require some real heavy lifting.
“We’re doing rotor inspections on our low pressure turbines, that requires us to life an exhaust hood that weighs about 130,000 pounds,” Downey said. “We’ve got the inner casings of those low pressure turbines and each of those is 115,000 pounds, and then the rotor itself is 350,000 pounds.”
Downey says it will take about 1,000 additional technicians to get all of the work done. They make a difference to the local economy.
“They come in and they stay in the hotels and local Air B&Bs while they’re here, and actually the refueling outage influx of people comes in long before we actually start the refueling outage. You’ll see some of these folks starting to come in around mid to late summer.”
Downey says the plant also hires local workers to help during refueling outages, but some jobs have to be done by specialists who travel around the country to different nuclear plants.
He can’t tell us how long the refueling outage will be, but they usually last months.
Unit 1 has already been brought down to 62% power to allow for equipment testing before the outage begins. In the meantime, Unit 2 is at 100% power.
