Last month NEI reported that River Bend set a record BWR refuelling outage of just 17 days (see NEI November 2001, p7). It has since been pointed out to us that TVO in Finland had already set the world record for the shortest outage. As far as we know, this is the world's shortest BWR refuelling outage - if any readers know of a shorter one, please let us know.
In May this year the refuelling outage at Olkiluoto 1, which included valve services and servicing of main circulation pumps, lasted 7 days, 20 hours and 34 minutes (breaker to breaker).
The outage included two extra pump services compared to the original plans. TVO received Westinghouse's maintenance services during the outage. About 40 European Field Services employees, working in parallel with refuelling operations, were involved.
Also in the same month, the Olkiluoto 2 outage was completed in 14 days and 16 hours.
