Koeberg’s Unit 2 has been reconnected to State-owned power utility Eskom’s national electricity grid following a 36-day planned maintenance outage.
The outage, dubbed Outage 222, as it is the twenty-second outage on Unit 2, has become the second-shortest outage performed in the station’s history, surpassed only by a 32-day outage on Unit 1 in 1999.
During Unit 2’s outage, Unit 1 was operating at 100% power.
“Outage 222 was a maintenance and refueling outage, requiring the reactor to be shut down, as not all work can be done while the unit is in operation. During this outage, about one-third of the fuel in the reactor core is replaced with new fuel,” Eskom said in a statement on Wednesday.
Eskom expects Unit 2 to get back up to 100% reactor power within a few days, as several tests need to be performed as it increases in power output.