Czech Temelín to remain offline for more than a month as another outage is added

The Temelín nuclear power plant is extending its outage at unit 2. The unit was shut down during its restart on 7 September and has not supplied electricity to the grid since due to a technical fault. Temelín's unit 2 will now remain offline until 1 October.

Extending outages has been the number one problem for nuclear power plants this year. Unit 2 had originally been scheduled to restart on 26 August, but the outage was subsequently extended until 6 September. While it did begin restarting then, it was shut down again after several hours of generation, with an outage scheduled until 20 September.

ČEZ today announced a further outage until the end of September, with the unit expected to restart on the first day of October. At the same time, unit 1 is also now offline, meaning that the entire Temelín plant has been shut down since 26 August (except for several hours before the restart was interrupted).

According to the plant's spokesperson, unit 2 has now been cooled down and work is under way at full pace. The reason for shutting down unit 2 was an inspection of the turbine bearing housing sealing system.

Inspections carried out after the equipment was dismantled also identified the cause: insufficient clearance in several oil inserts. The clearance will be increased by 0,3 mm. The modification will be carried out on a specialised machine at the manufacturing plant in Plzeň.

The bearing housing sealing segments were transported yesterday for modification by the manufacturer.

The additional outage lasting more than a month can be estimated to result in lost generation of around 0,85 TWh of electricity. The newly extended outages will therefore erase the positive effect of shortening the outage of unit 3 at the Dukovany nuclear power plant, which will end on 2 October rather than 19 October.