For Immediate Release Callaway Plant Returns to Service Following Refueling and Maintenance Outage
FULTON, MO., Nov. 8, 2008—AmerenUE’s Callaway Plant, located near Fulton, Mo., has returned to service after completing a regularly scheduled refueling and maintenance outage that began Oct. 10. The nuclear power plant began generating electricity again at 9:07 p.m. on Friday (Nov. 7).
Refueling outages at the 1,190-megawatt plant occur every 18 months. This was the 16th refueling since the plant began operating in 1984.
“I am proud of the entire Callaway team and thankful for everyone’s hard work,” said Fadi Diya, vice president of Nuclear Operations. “We refueled the reactor and performed about 8,000 maintenance activities without any lost-time injuries. This was our first sub-30-day refueling outage in Callaway’s 24-year operating history, following our first breaker-to-breaker run.”
At the time this refueling outage began, the Callaway Plant had completed its first continuous cycle run, operating for 520 days since it restarted from its last refueling without ever being out of service.
During refueling, operators replaced 85 of the 193 fuel assemblies in the reactor core. A fuel assembly is an 8 ½-inch-square bundle of 12-foot-long metal tubes containing ceramic pellets of uranium dioxide fuel. Each fuel pellet is about the size of a pencil eraser.
Used fuel assemblies removed from the reactor are stored temporarily in the spent fuel pool—a stainless steel-lined water pool inside the fuel building. The pool—about the size of a tennis court—has enough space to safely store all the used fuel that accumulates at the plant until 2020, with the capability for additional storage capacity through 2024 when the plant’s current operating license expires.
As in past refueling outages, thousands of maintenance activities, modifications, inspections and tests were also performed throughout the plant.
In 2007, the Callaway Plant accounted for 19 percent of AmerenUE’s power generation and 12 percent of the total generation on the Ameren system. AmerenUE, a subsidiary of St. Louis-based Ameren Corporation, serves 1.2 million electric customers and 127,000 natural gas customers in a 24,000-square-mile area covering north, central and eastern