Shutdown of Dukovany nuclear unit 3 ends after 2.5 months

Dukovany, South Moravia, June 8 (CTK) - The planned shutdown of unit 3 at the Dukovany nuclear power plant for fuel change ended today when the power engineers resumed electricity production after two and a half months, plant spokesman Jiri Bezdek has told CTK.

The outage involved checking the reactor pressure vessel and thousands of other activities, in addition to the fuel change, he added.

All four generating units at Dukovany are now operational and the plant will reach full output next week.

The unit 3 started supplying power to the transmission grid at 15:00 today. "It has been a challenging period with a lot of interconnected activities, but the third unit is back in operation. And we expect it to run reliably for more than a year thanks to longer fuel cycles," said Dukovany power plant head Roman Havlin.

In total, the power engineers had to deal with more than 20,000 work tasks and some 60 planned technical and investment modernisation actions.

The power engineers plan outages of the large nuclear units for the periods of lower consumption and with respect to the operation of both nuclear power plants.

"We always try to schedule the outages of the largest Czech units for the periods of lower consumption and minimise the impact on the power grid. At the same time, however, we must also take into account the length of the fuel cycles of both plants. That is why we shut down the first unit of the Temelin nuclear power plant on Friday as planned," said Bohdan Zronek, board member and head of the nuclear power division at the CEZ state-controlled power utility.

The Czech Republic has six nuclear units in two power plants. Dukovany delivered 14.7 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity to the grid last year, while Temelin in southern Bohemia produced 15 TWh. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the commissioning of the first Dukovany unit.

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