Refueling to take nuclear plant off-line

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, May 5, 2001

Associated Press

RICHLAND — The Northwest’s only nuclear power plant shuts down May 18 for refueling, leaving the Bonneville Power Administration without its workhorse electricity producer for 30 days in the worst drought in a quarter-century.

BPA and Energy Northwest, the 13-utility public power consortium that owns the Columbia Generating Station, have been planning for the outage for almost two years.

"We arranged for power and made purchases to cover that outage months ago," said Ed Mosey, a spokesman for BPA in Portland, Ore. "It will have absolutely no effect on reliability or price."

The Columbia Generating Station, which typically produces about 5 percent of all the electricity in the Northwest, will contribute about 10 percent of the region’s generation over the next year because of diminished water supplies here in hydropower country.

"We rely on it to operate reliably," Mosey said. "If it were to go out for unscheduled maintenance, then we would be thrown into the market. They have done a very good job of keeping the plant in operation through this winter."

A year ago, the price of power on the open market was about $25 per kilowatt-hour. Now it’s closer to $300.

This is the shortest outage ever planned at the 1,200-megawatt plant, with twice as much fuel loaded to stretch the length of time between outages — plans that seem almost prescient now but were actually made long before the drought of 2001 threatened summer hydropower capacity, salmon survival and irrigated orchards.

The board of directors of Energy Northwest understood the power market and believed the plant’s weather-independent operation would one day be appreciated, said Scott Oxenford, the general manager of Columbia Generating Station.

"We had the foresight that we were going to be needed," Oxenford said.

Since the plant came on-line in 1984, refuelings typically have been scheduled in the spring, when river water is abundant and power demand is relatively low. But water isn’t plentiful this year, although the Northwest Power Planning Council has said the region can probably squeak through the summer without rolling blackouts.

John Dabney, outage manager, has been working on this outage since the last one ended. His workforce will nearly double in size, with 800 contract workers to be added to the regular staff of 1,050.

The reactor has 764 fuel assemblies, each 12 feet long and weighing just under 800 pounds. A huge mechanical arm will remove 300 spent fuel assemblies from the core, store them in a nearby pool of water —and insert 300 new ones. The remaining 464 fuel assemblies will be shuffled around within the core.

The goal is to run uninterrupted immediately following the outage, Dabney said.

"If we come out in 30 days and only run for 10 days, it wouldn’t be worth it," he said. "I want us to be reliable."

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