The power plant's shutdown is planned for Friday night and will occur at approximately one-third of the reactor rated power. According to the power plant management, this will be a common outage associated with essential checks and investment activities.
"We will replace a quarter of the fuel assemblies, check the safety systems and implement 62 investment actions that further increase safety and efficiency,"
A lot of work awaits the technicians around the turbine and especially on the generator, where they will change its rotor and protective shield. "We will place a backup rotor into the generator, and the manufacturer will then review the existing one, which will serve as a backup in the years to come. It is a common procedure. We replaced the rotors at Unit 2 three years ago," said Jan Kruml, adding that it is precisely on the turbine generator that they will be forced to work the entire outage.
Substantial work will include inspections of safety divisions, replacing 42 out of 163 fuel assemblies, or replacing one of three transformer units. Out of the 62 investment actions, the continued replacement of a part of the piping of the essential service water system will be challenging, where the technicians will replace the carbon steel pipes with stainless steel ones.
"Outages are the most demanding period of the year for us, and we need to coordinate thousands of activities in limited time-space. The safe and high-quality performance of the works is the basis for the safe and long-term operation of the key Czech emission-free energy source,"
Including the external suppliers, around a thousand people participate in the outage works. It is the first planned outage at Temelín this year, and the two-month outage of Unit 2 will begin in the second half of July.
Unit 1 has been in continuous operation since May 22 last year. In almost eleven months, Unit 1 produced over 8,5 million MWh of emission less electricity and allowed to save almost seven million tons of CO2, which would otherwise have been released by coal-fired power plants.
