When Arizona Public Services Company crews at Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, the nation's most productive power plant, reconnected Unit 3 to the grid on Saturday last at 5:37 p.m. Nov. 5, they set a new plant record for the shortest outage servicing ever at the facility, the third time for the plant an outage was completed in under 30 days.
The shortest ever record for the plant is now 28 days, 17 hours and 37 minutes, the company said on Thursday. “By comparison,” the company boasted, “the average length of a refueling and maintenance outage at all U.S. reactors in 2015 was 36.3 days, according to industry data.”
Palo Verde is well known for its power production. The plant has three virtually identical 1,330 megawatt reactors that in 2015 achieved their 24th consecutive year as the nation's largest power producer with total electricity production of 32.5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. In addition, Unit 1 at the plant produced the highest output of any nuclear unit in the world and all three units individually produced power outputs that put them each in the top seven in the world.
Short outages, of course, increase a unit's bottom line. Unit 3's planned refueling outage in October and November bested the plant record set by Unit 2 in 2014, which lasted 28 days, 22 hours. The first under 30 days outage record was established at the plant in 2013, when Unit 1 was closed down for refueling and maintenance in a show of professionalism that posted the record of 29 days, 18 hours.
In so many words, “the more days Palo Verde is operating, rather than in a refueling outage, the more low-cost energy is available to customers across Arizona and the Southwest,” said APS Executive Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer Bob Bement in a statement.
Every year of operation at Palo Verde represents 2.8 million cars of climate-affecting pollution that is avoided when compared to the possibility of other power sources. That number is multiplied by 30 when considering the plant's lifelong service, which began in 1986. Since operations began, the plant has produced more than 780 million megawatt-hours of electricity, “providing environmentally friendly energy to more than 4 million people … spread among California, New Mexico and far west Texas,” the company said.