Wednesday, 21 October 2020: This morning Unit 2 of the Koeberg Nuclear Power
Station successfully completed its 24th outage since it first
started to generate electricity. The unit is currently synchronised onto the
grid and will load up to full capacity by next week. This will give Eskom a
reliable electricity output of approximately 900MW for close on 400 days,
helping ease the supply constraints on the rest of the power station fleet.
Unit 1 continues to operate as normal at full
capacity, and is scheduled for a refuelling and maintenance outage starting in
February 2021.
This was a planned and regular refuelling outage,
where the nuclear fuel in the reactor core was replaced with new fuel. All the
nuclear fuel is removed from the core during a refuelling outage, the reactor
cavity drained, and cleaned, then refilled before the fuel is placed into the
core.
During the outage, routine maintenance was performed
on the plant in order to keep the station performing safely and optimally.
While many maintenance activities can be performed without switching off the
station, there are some more intrusive activities that can only be performed
when the unit is shut down.
Koeberg staff performed the refuelling and
maintenance, with the assistance of 32 international specialists required to
safely perform some specialist and very focused maintenance tasks. These crews
arrived in South Africa starting on 31 July 2020, and followed all the COVID-19
protocols, including COVID-19 screening and testing, and quarantine.
The outage began on 11 August 2020.
ENDS