With hot functional testing completed in early June, the owner of Finland's Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant announced that the long-delayed Unit 3, a European Pressurized Reactor, would be connected to the grid in December and ready to enter commercial operating status by May 2019.
Just eight days later, Teollisuuden Voima Oyj (TVO) announced that further delays were expected and the plant would not likely be ready to enter commercial status until September 2019.
TVO now says it had been waiting for confirmation of the “overall rebaseline schedule” from the unit's Areva-Siemens construction consortium, Nuclear Engineering International reported.
The blame for this delay was “due to some delays in the hot functional testing phase,” TVO said. Those tests, which took from December 2017 and May 2018, took 50 days longer than expected, TVO now says. In addition, “based on the findings of the commissioning tests, a comprehensive modification package will be implemented at OL3 over the next few months to update the plant's electrical and instrumentation and control systems,” TVO said in a statement.
Once the instrumentation is recalibrate, some of the hot functional tests will need to be repeated. “The whole commissioning is performed with utmost care, without compromise,” said OL3 project director Jouni Silvennoinen. “We will have a modern and safe plant, an its commissioning will strengthen our know-how for the operating phase,” he said.