The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant Unit 1 began a scheduled refueling and maintenance outage on Saturday after producing more than 13.6 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity during the past 18 months.
“Our work during the last outage allowed Watts Bar Unit 1 to continually generate safe, low-cost, carbon-free nuclear energy to reliably power daily life across the Tennessee Valley for nearly 500 days,” said Paul Simmons, site vice president. “During this outage, we will continue focusing on safely upgrading and improving our plant systems to again deliver 18 months of safe, reliable service for our neighbors in the Valley.”
An additional 1,000 TVA and contract employees are supplementing the site’s regular staff during the outage. More than 11,500 work activities are planned, including loading new fuel assemblies, performing inspections of the unit’s reactor equipment and steam generators, maintenance of plant equipment, and additional equipment upgrades.
Watt Bar’s two units produce enough power for 1.3 million homes. TVA also operates three units at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant near Decatur, Alabama, and two units at Sequoyah Nuclear Plant near Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee. Collectively, TVA’s nuclear fleet reliably provides more than one-third of the electricity used across the Valley.