Tennessee Valley Authority Shuts Watts Bar Nuclear Station For Repairs

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) (Chattanooga, Tennessee) has shut down the reactor at the Watts Bar Nuclear Station #1 in Spring City, Tennessee, in order to repair a mass bearing loss in the Charlie LP turbine after tripping offline on May 30, 2006. TVA will have the 1,270-megawatt (MW) unit offline for two to four weeks to make repairs.

TVA had problems with leakage in the winter of 2005 that caused the same reactor to be taken offline early for a refueling outage in order to plug the tubes.

There were similar problems with the steam generator at TVA’s Sequoyah Nuclear plant in 2004, which had experienced some degradation to tubes within the steam generators, because of wear, vibration, cracking, and a variety of other reasons.

As first reported by Industrial Info in May 2000, TVA is planning to spend more than $300 million to replace steam generators due to leaking tubes at the Watts Bar plant in September 2006 during a planned refueling outage. The unit is expected to be offline for around 70 days. In 2004, a thorough inspection of 18,696 tubes found that 4.6% were identified as in need of repair, and 870 tubes were repaired at that time in 2004

The plant began operation in 1996 after almost 23 years of interrupted construction. TVA has not yet commented on whether the forced outage will affect the scheduled steam generator replacement outage planned for fall 2006.

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