Planned outage of third unit at Czech Dukovany plant starts today and will run until April

A planned outage of Unit 3 at the Dukovany Nuclear Power Plant begins today for routine maintenance, equipment inspections and the replacement of part of the fuel with fresh fuel. Operators will begin reducing reactor power at noon, plant spokesperson Jiří Bezděk told the Czech News Agency (ČTK). It will be the first outage of a Dukovany unit this year. Unit 3 is expected to resume generating electricity in April. The other three Dukovany units are operating.

„Energy sector staff expect the outage to end during April, but ČEZ will confirm the exact date for Unit 3 to resume generation based on the progress of the planned work and the results of the inspections and tests,“ the spokesperson said.

Since January 2023, Dukovany’s units have moved from 11-month fuel cycles to 15-month cycles. Instead of the four fuel-replacement outages that previously took place each year, there will be just three this year.

This will be the 36th outage involving the replacement of part of the fuel with fresh fuel at Dukovany Unit 3 since it began operating in 1987. Energy sector staff will carry out 15,000 work tasks during the outage. „In addition to standard maintenance, the Unit 3 outage will also involve 54 technical and investment projects that will further modernise some of the equipment and help ensure its reliability during the next stage of the plant’s operation,“ said Roman Havlín, director of the Dukovany Nuclear Power Plant.

The most time- and technically demanding work will include leak-tightness inspections of steam generator heat-transfer surfaces, a major overhaul of two of the six main circulation pumps, a major inspection of one diesel generator, and inspections of the blades and equipment of both turbine units. Energy sector staff will also begin replacing the unit sectional switchboards.

„We will operate both our nuclear power plants for at least 60 years, and we are tailoring the scope of maintenance and investment accordingly,“ said Bohdan Zronek, a member of ČEZ’s board of directors and director of its nuclear energy division.

Czechia currently has six nuclear units at two power plants. The four Dukovany units were commissioned successively between 1985 and 1987. Last year, the plant generated 14.3 TWh of electricity, with output exceeding 14 TWh for the 13th time. In 2023, the Temelín Nuclear Power Plant exceeded 16 TWh of generation for the second consecutive year.

At the end of last October, ČEZ received final bids for the construction of a new Dukovany unit from three bidders: North American company Westinghouse, South Korea’s KHNP and France’s EDF. The bidders also submitted non-binding offers for three additional reactors. The evaluation is expected to continue until the end of February this year, when the government will receive the final ranking of the bids. A contract with the selected bidder is expected to be signed by the end of this year. The new unit at Dukovany is scheduled for completion by 2036. It will be built next to the existing plant and will eventually replace some of its capacity.