PPL’s Unit 2 reactor at the Susquehanna nuclear power plant near Berwick, Pennsylvania, returned to service following the unit’s 10th planned refuelling and inspection outage. These planned biennial outages are crucial to the operating cycle of the plant, not only to refuel, but also to perform systematic preventive maintenance and make upgrades to plant equipment. Outage teams completed about 2500 work items, including replacing 300 fuel bundles, upgrading the feedwater system for greater efficiency, replacing about 12% of the control rods used to manage reactivity, conducting 2500 visual inspections of piping and core components, overhauling two large motors and performing maintenance on main steam isolation valves.
