Commonwealth Edison’s Dresden 3 nuclear plant in Illinois set a refuelling record for US boiler water reactors on 3 October when it resumed service after an outage of only 17 days, 23 hours and 55 minutes.
The 29-year-old, 794MWe General Electric BWR began the outage on 15 September. In addition to refuelling the unit, Commonwealth Edison replaced 20 condenser bellow assemblies, made improvements to the electro-hydraulic control system, and upgraded the unit’s moisture separator vanes.
Until Dresden 3’s feat, the refuelling record for US BWRs had been held by the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Browns Ferry plant in Alabama, which completed a refuelling outage in spring 1999 in 18 days, 2 hours, 29 minutes.
