Eskom has decided to defer the replacement of steam generators at unit 2 of its Koeberg nuclear power station, owing to concerns that it will worsen an energy crunch, senior officials said on Friday.
Some of the maintenance work that was scheduled to be performed on Unit 2 of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station in Cape Town during a five-month outage from January to June, has had to be delayed to 2023.
Unit 2 was taken offline on January 18 for a regular refuelling and to replace the unit’s three steam generators. However, Eskom announced during a media briefing on Friday that the replacement of the steam generators would not go ahead as planned.
Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer said that during a final review that was done by Eskom and the main contractor, Framatome, to confirm whether the planned work would be completed on schedule, it was concluded that there was a “high risk of the unit being returned to the grid later” than was planned.
“Due to the potential severe affect of returning Unit 2 [to service] later than end of June, we made the decision to defer the steam generator work to the next outage in August next year,” said Oberholzer.
This, he said, was to avoid the risk of the unit still being offline during the high winter demand period. The two units at Koeberg each had generation capacity of 920MW, and outages of the units were planned at times of the year when the effect on the overall electricity supply was minimised as far as possible to reduce the possibility of load-shedding.
Eskom was not able to confirm whether the delay in the replacement of Unit 2’s steam generators would result in additional costs being incurred.
However, according to Oberholzer, one of the reasons the maintenance work could not proceed as scheduled was because some of the facilities that had to be in place at the power station were not ready in time.
Those included construction of a building where the old steam generators that were removed could be stored. Riedewaan Bakardien, chief nuclear officer, said that when those steam generators were removed from the reactor, they were radioactive, so they needed to be stored in a very specific type of building. The building had not been completed in time for Eskom to proceed with the replacement of the steam generators.
Oberholzer said Eskom was now investigating why the facilities were not ready. If “consequence management is required” for those employees who were in charge of making sure that the facilities would be ready in time, “that will be implemented”, he said.
“We’ve had a discussion with Framatome and I have asked them to provide us with detailed information of what needs to be in place and to make sure that we are 100% ready [before maintenance outages start] so that we don’t find ourselves in this situation again,” said Oberholzer.
Replacing the steam generators was a precautionary safety measure that needed to be completed as one of the requirements for extending Koeberg’s operating life. According to Eskom, while this deferral does not affect the safe operation of Koeberg, replacement of these components was an important element of the Safety Submission being prepared for submittal to the National Nuclear Regulator in mid-2022, in support of Koeberg’s life-extension licence application.
The current operating licence expires in 2024 and these upgrades were required by the National Nuclear Regulator to extend the operating life of Koeberg by a further 20 years.
Eskom said that the steam generator replacement project on Unit 1 will proceed as planned, starting in September.
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