With conversations developing about a new reactor and new technology possibly coming to Evergy, the utility’s existing reactor is now offline.
Wolf Creek’s 27th scheduled refueling outage began this week. Outages last for several weeks and are scheduled every 18 months. In this case, Wolf Creek is replacing around a third of its nearly 200 uranium fuel assemblies and main transformer elements There are other maintenance tasks and equipment upgrades ahead as part of a list involving nearly 10,000 specific work activities.
Outages also mean additional staff to make sure everything is handled smoothly and safely. Evergy says it will have around 700 “supplemental workers” involved with the outage now underway.
This outage is getting started less than two weeks after Evergy announced a memorandum of understanding with TerraPower and the Kansas Department of Commerce for a possible new Natrium reactor — possibly at Wolf Creek as complementary power using new technology and different power generation and cooling methods than Wolf Creek.
