Two nuclear units, one a Dominion (NYSE:D) facility in Virginia and the other a Duke Energy (NYSE:DUK) reactor in South Carolina, went offline during the weekend for regularly scheduled refueling outages.
Both the Dominion North Anna 1 facility in Louisa County, Virginia, and the Duke Catawba 2 unit in York County, South Carolina were listed at zero power on Monday, Sept. 12 after being near full power as recently as Friday, Sept. 9.
A Duke Energy spokesperson said by phone that Catawba 2 did enter a regularly-scheduled refueling and maintenance outage over the weekend. Catawba 2 operates on an 18-month refueling outage.
Dominion operators removed North Anna Unit 1 from service over the weekend for a scheduled refueling and maintenance outage. “This marked the completion of 525 days 7 hours and 9 minutes of continuous operation. This is the longest continuous run in North Anna’s history,” Dominion said in a statement issued to its employees.
Key activities during the North Anna outage will include an In Service Inspection (ISI) of the reactor vessel internals. Also scheduled is a replacement of the In Core Flux Thimbles. These are tubes within the reactor that house instruments used to monitor conditions while the reactor is operating, according to Dominion.
The North Anna refueling outage is the first of two fall outages planned for the company’s nuclear units. The second is Surry Unit 1, which is scheduled to occur in the fourth quarter, according to Dominion.
The North Anna station includes two pressurized water reactors (PWRs) that each has a nameplate capacity of more than 950 MW.
The Catawba station includes two PWRs that each has a nameplate capacity of about 1,200 MW.
