Operators at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant safely returned Unit 2 to service on May 13 after completing a scheduled refueling and maintenance outage.
“The completion of work in this outage best positions Watts Bar Unit 2 to continue to generate reliable, safe, and clean power for the people of the Tennessee Valley throughout the next 18-month fuel cycle,” said Chris Reneau, TVA Watts Bar site vice president. “We’re proud of the professionalism of our Watts Bar and TVA employees, contract partners, and all the additional skilled supplemental workers who joined us this outage, who worked together to perform maintenance and make reliability improvements and upgrades to the unit.”
During the outage, the site’s population nearly doubled as additional skilled TVA employees from other plants and contractors were brought in to support the approximately 1,000 Watts Bar site employees. The team completed more than 11,000 work activities throughout the outage, which included loading 92 new nuclear fuel assemblies, performing inspections of reactor components and steam generators and maintenance of plant equipment and installing unit enhancements.
Watts Bar Unit 2 is one of seven operational TVA nuclear reactors. TVA’s nuclear fleet is the third largest in the nation.
The Watts Bar team returned Unit 1 to service on May 11 after completing a main generator maintenance outage. Both units operate at 100 percent power.