Eskom delays Koeberg maintenance amid energy crunch

Eskom confirmed on Thursday that it took the decision to delay taking one of the units at the Koeberg nuclear power station offline on Wednesday, as had been planned previously, due to this week’s severe energy supply crunch.

The unit was scheduled to be taken offline for refuelling and maintenance, but this work has now been delayed due to the current electricity supply challenges that have seen South Africa plunged into severe, stage-6 load shedding.

“After careful assessment of the current state of the national grid, Eskom has decided to delay the start of the outage of unit 1 of the Koeberg nuclear power station to allow time to stabilise the system and the recovery of some generation capacity,” the utility said in a statement.

News24 reported earlier on Thursday that Eskom had delayed the planned maintenance work at Koeberg.

The refuelling and maintenance work on the Koeberg unit will instead commence this weekend, but only if “grid conditions have recovered to ensure stability of the system”.

“While Eskom is ready to commence with the outage, with the contractors and all the requisite resources on standby, grid stability is an important consideration prior to shutting down the unit 1 reactor to commence the maintenance and refuelling outage,” said Sadika Touffie, Eskom’s acting chief nuclear officer, in a statement.

“This is going to be a long but necessary outage – the first of its kind for Koeberg. Eskom has taken care to ensure no undue delays are experienced once the project gets under way.”

Six months

The unit is expected to be offline for about six months, increasing the risk of higher stages of load shedding. Eskom’s two generating units at Koeberg produce up to 920MW of electricity each.

“This will be the 26th refuelling outage on unit 1 since commissioning and will also see the replacement of the unit’s three steam generators as part of the long-term operation programme of the power station,” Eskom said.

Read: Eskom starts work on giant battery storage project

“Unlike other types of power stations, where fuel can be added to continue generating power, the fuel at a nuclear power station is sealed inside a reactor vessel, which is opened for refuelling every 15-18 months. This is also a time when the station will perform certain required inspections on equipment and perform more intrusive maintenance that cannot be performed when the unit is online.”  — © 2022 NewsCentral Media

Get TechCentral’s daily newsletter