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Power Plant Ends Outage by Chris Mulick, Herald staff writer Tri-City Herald, July 4, 2001

The Columbia Generating Station nuclear power plant has been restarted and should be operating at full power by late Thursday, Energy Northwest officials say.

The plant began putting juice on the regional power grid Monday and was expected to be at 65 percent of power by midnight Tuesday.

That ends the plant's refueling outage, which ran a little more than two weeks longer than planned. The overrun further hurt chances the drought-stressed region could use water supplies to help fish runs.

Had crews held to the original schedule of 29 days, 22 hours, it would've beaten the old record for the shortest refueling outage by six days. Instead, the shutdown lasted 44 days, 13 hours and 25 minutes.

Energy Northwest, which initially reported a series of worker errors were partly responsible for delays, said Tuesday that most of the overtime actually was because of unforeseen equipment problems.

"Human error was very small," said outage manager John Dabney.

The Bonneville Power Administration, which buys all of the plant's power and has been critical of past plant operating hiccups, monitored the outage.

"The schedule was very ambitious," said Bonneville spokesman Ed Mosey. "We give them a lot of credit for giving it a shot. They did the best they could."

Among the series of unplanned events were a lightning strike that damaged a transformer, the discovery of problems with a pair of 6-ton valves designed to isolate water in the reactor and a steam leak that could not be repaired with the plant running full bore.

Those conspired to more than eat up any gains that may have been made in completing some tasks quickly, such as replacing control rods in the reactor and disassembling and reassembling the turbine generator.

Dabney, who was primarily concerned about getting the plant in shape to run reliably for the next two years -- which would be its longest run ever -- turned Columbia over to its operations staff Monday morning.

"I was disheartened that I couldn't give them a 30-day outage," he said. "This didn't work out like I had planned."

Avoidable or not, the delays couldn't have come at a worse time. Already worried about refilling reservoirs for winter, river managers had to run more water through turbines to replace the nuclear plant's 1,150 megawatts.

"We had to use some water we wish we wouldn't have had to," Mosey said.

That further jeopardizes already doubtful plans to spill water over dams this summer to aid migrating fish. The most recent forecast puts this year's January through July runoff at The Dalles at 53.9 million acre-feet, just barely above the worst showing ever. That's also just above the amount the BPA believes it needs to meet anticipated power demand this winter with no buffer.

It takes about 600,000 acre feet of water to replace the power produced by the nuclear plant for two weeks. That is about equivalent to the amount of water dedicated to the small spring spill program earlier this year.

Related Page:
BPA Won't Risk Power to Aid Fish Migration
Council asks BPA to Make Power Top Priority