Florida Power & Light Nuclear Unit Offline for an Additional Six Days

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). Florida Power & Light Company (NYSE:FPL)(Juno Beach, Florida) Saint Lucie 02, an 850 MW nuclear unit located in Jensen Beach, Florida, was taken offline again Friday morning. Officials stated that the unit was manually tripped when a hydraulic leak on the #1 throttle valve became too severe to repair with the unit online. The plant hopes to have the unit repaired and back online next week.

The unit was returning from a scheduled refueling outage, when the leak was discovered. Officials held the unit at 45% power Thursday in efforts to repair the leak with the unit online. The spring refueling outage for Saint Lucie 02 has been troublesome at best. The originally scheduled 40-day outage was extended twice due to problems with a governor valve and a reactor cooling pump (RCP) seal.

Part of the original Spring 2006 outage scope called for inspection of the reactor vessel head. FPL plans to replace the reactor head on the Combustion Engineering (CE) pressurized water reactor (PWR), as well as upgrade two steam generators on the 23-year-old nuclear unit in conjunction with a refueling outage scheduled for Fall 2007. This project is set to cost FPL $200 million to complete.

The reactor head on Saint Lucie 01 was replaced during a 64-day outage in the fall of 2005 at the cost of $30 million. Saint Lucie 01 came online in May 1976.

Saint Lucie is one of four nuclear stations owned and operated by FPL and is part of the approximately 34,000 MW of power generation capacity that FPL has throughout the United States.

Industrial info tracks planned and unplanned maintenance outages as part of its Power Plant Outage Tracking Database. Contact Industrial Info’s Member Center at 1-800-762-3361 for details.

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