On 1 March, Brunswick 1 went offline after 707 days, five hours and 39 minutes of continuous operation — a world record for a LWR.
The unit has held the record since 21 January, 2001, after passing Three Mile Island 1’s previous record of 668 days, set in 1999. Canada’s Pickering 7, a Candu, holds the record for all reactor types (894 days).
Brunswick plant vice president Jack Keenan said that, while Carolina Power & Light would shut down a unit to ensure safety and reliability, “our long-term goal is to regularly operate our units breaker-to-breaker between refuelling outages.” During the current refuelling outage, expected to last one month, work to uprate the unit by 15% over the next few years will commence.
