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Yakima Nuclear Plant Back on Line by Linda Ashton, Associated Press The Spokesman-Review, July 4, 2001

Energy crisis brings Columbia out of 15-year retirement

YAKIMA -- The Northwest's only nuclear power plant returned to service Tuesday, 15 days behind schedule, at a time when the West's electricity supplies have been taxed by drought, high prices and high temperatures.

The 1,200-megawatt Columbia Generating Station should be at 100 percent power by midnight today, said Gary Miller, a spokesman for Energy Northwest, which owns the plant on leased land at the Hanford nuclear reservation.

Over the next year, the plant will provide about 10 percent of the electricity in the hydropower-dependent Northwest.

Energy Northwest, a 13-utility consortium, had an ambitious schedule to refuel the nuclear reactor for a 23-month operating cycle in just 29 days and 22 hours.

It was to be the shortest refueling outage in the plant's 17-year history while preparing it for the longest operating cycle -- almost two years.

But a number of problems, including an electrical storm that set the schedule back a full day, stretched the outage two weeks past its planned mid-June return to the power grid.

"It is with a heavy heart and disappointment that I tell you we couldn't make the 29 days, 22 hours or Energy Northwest's corporate vision ... for the shortest outage ever," John Dabney, outage manager, said in a statement to employees.

"This has been a long, tough outage."

The Bonneville Power Administration -- a federal power marketing agency that sells all of the plant's electricity along with electricity from 29 federal dams on the Columbia-Snake river system -- purchased replacement power in advance of the refueling and maintenance outage.

The delayed outage "hasn't been catastrophic," said Mike Hansen, a spokesman for the BPA in Portland.

But it was a factor in BPA's announcement last Friday that it couldn't afford to spill water over federal dams this summer to help young fish migrate to the Pacific Ocean, he said.

With the nuclear power plant down and near-record lows flows forecast for rivers in the Columbia Basin, BPA said it needed every drop of water for electricity generation or to store to avoid rolling blackouts come winter.

Spills this summer would reduce the power system reliability to an unacceptably low level, said Steven Wright, the agency's acting administrator.

"We simply could not take that risk," Hansen said.

BPA also had to purchase some additional replacement power because of the delay, but he could not say how much or what it cost.

Columbia Generating Station disconnected from BPA's electrical transmission grid on May 18, and had hoped to be back on line June 18.

Efforts to return the plant to service last week were thwarted by some mechanical problems, and discovering and fixing them takes time as the plant is powered up and then back down for work, Miller said.

Related Page:
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