South Africa’s state-owned power utility Eskom announced that its Unit 2 of Koeberg nuclear plant is back into operation, Reuters reported.
According to ESI Africa, Unit 2 of Koeberg nuclear plant has been shut down for about a month for routine maintenance and refueling.
Koeberg which is the only nuclear plant in Africa has two units and provides 1,800 MW of power to the national grid.
Eskom said in a statement that outage 222 is the second shortest outage performed in the station’s history.
During this outage, about one third of the fuel in the reactor core was replaced with new fuel.
“An outage at a nuclear installation requires detailed planning in order to ensure that nuclear safety is not compromised and that the unit starts generating power again as soon as possible” Nuclear Power Station Manager at Koeberg , Velaphi Ntuli, said
“With Koeberg being a baseload power station (which runs continuously unless it is taken out of service for an outage), the nuclear professionals working at the power station are fully aware of the need for the power station to have both units running at full capacity” He added.
During Unit 2’s outage, Unit 1 was operating at 100% power, quietly powering up the City of Cape Town. Unit 2 will be operating with 100% power in few days as several tests need to be performed as it increases in power output.
