Neckarwestheim Nuclear Power Plant: Unit I Offline for First Part of Annual Maintenance
Scheduled maintenance work on the generator results in two-part maintenance
Karlsruhe. The annual maintenance of Unit I of the Neckarwestheim Nuclear Power Plant (GKN I) will take place in two phases this year. Today the facility will be taken offline as scheduled in order to conduct the necessary inspection and maintenance work, replace fuel elements and conduct an inspection of the three-phase generator in the non-nuclear section of the plant. The second part of the annual maintenance will take place in fall, during which comprehensive maintenance work will be performed on the three-phase generator, as the largest individual project.
“The duration of the maintenance work on the generator would have been very difficult to fit into the maintenance timetable of EnBW Kraftwerke in spring,” says Helmut Scherla, Unit I director. “This is why, in consultation with regulatory authorities, we opted for the two-part annual maintenance. In this manner we can conduct the necessary inspection and maintenance work and the fuel element replacement in good time and according to schedule and thus abide by our safety-oriented procedure for operating and maintaining our plant.”
During the first part of the annual maintenance, some 150 employees from manufacturing and special firms will provide assistance to the GKN team. A total of around 900 individual tasks are on the agenda.
The maintenance work will take place under the supervision of the Umweltministerium Baden-Württemberg (Baden-Württemberg Ministry of the Environment) and will be overseen by order of the Ministerium von Gutachtern des TÜV (Ministry of Assessors of the TÜV), the KeTAG (Kerntechnik-Gutachterarbeitsgemeinschaft Baden-Württemberg) (Baden-Württemberg Nuclear Technology Assessor Syndicate) and the MPA (Staatlichen Materialprüfungsanstalt, Stuttgart) (National Material Testing Laboratory, Stuttgart).
Unit I of the Neckarwestheim Nuclear Power Plant is a pressurized water reactor with a capacity of 840 megawatts. The plant has been in operation since 1976 and produced over five billion kilowatt hours of power in 2007.