Maintenance Accidents at South Africa Nuclear Plant Knock Out 900 Megawatts for Three Months

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Eskom (Sunninghill, South Africa), South Africa's power utility, reported that one of the 980-megawatt (MW) units at the Koeberg nuclear power station was shut down February 1, due to human error. At first, it was reported that the unit would be offline for a week for routine maintenance, but the down time was later revised to three months, putting more pressure on the already-stretched national grid and the subsequent load-shedding program.

Eskom reported that workers erecting scaffolding, to prepare for last week's planned maintenance, accidentally touched the main generator transformer at Unit 1 at Koeberg, west of Cape Town. The accident caused a limited earth fault and the reactor had to be shut down immediately to prevent it from burning out.

The loss of more than 900 MW to the grid meant that open-cycle, diesel-fed gas turbines, which are designed for "peaking" operations, had to be fired up to replace the lost power. The cost of running the diesel turbines for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, has been estimated at more than $21 million and would cause a total economic loss of more than $650 million, due to load-shedding and supply cut-offs.

An Eskom spokesman said technicians worked up to February 4 in an effort to restart the reactor, but when they synchronized the reactor with the national grid the following day, there was a short circuit in the turbine. Work on the turbine is now expected to be completed in May.

Eskom applies load-shedding at stage 1, costing the economy about $1.7 billion a month; stage 2 at $3.4 billion a month; and stage 3 at about $7 billion a month. The stages are implemented according to the level of power shortage. Stage 3 is rarely implemented.

For related information, see December 2, 2014, article - South Africa's Eskom Battles Murphy's Law at Mega Projects.

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