FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company (FENOC), a subsidiary of FirstEnergy Corp., has announced that its Perry Nuclear Power Plant in Perry, Ohio, was shut down at 12 am on Monday, March 9th for scheduled refueling, maintenance and a transformer replacement that is expected to enhance reliability.
While the unit is off line, 280 of the 748 fuel assemblies will be replaced, and numerous safety inspections will be conducted on the unit’s reactor vessel, turbine and electrical generator. In addition, preventative maintenance designed to promote continued safe and reliable operations will be performed on major components, including testing more than 130 valves, replacing several control rod blades and inspecting and cleaning cooling tower piping.
More than 1,000 temporary contractors and FENOC employees from the company’s other nuclear plants will supplement the Perry workforce during the outage.
The 1,268-megawatt Perry unit operated safely and reliably since the completion of its last refueling on May 16, 2013, generating more than 18.6 million megawatt hours of carbon-free electricity.