Africa-Press – South-Africa. Eskom has further delayed the outage of Koeberg Unit 1 to Saturday to allow time to stabilise the grid, it said in a statement on Thursday.
The country has been on Stage 6 load shedding since Wednesday midday with the expectation that it will be eased by one stage at 05:00 on Saturday morning. Additional outages on Wednesday evening caused Eskom to scramble to prevent Stage 7 and led to the last-minute postponement of the outage to Thursday afternoon.
The statement reads:
The outage cannot be postponed much longer as the unit has been online for 407 days since the last outage, and fuel is running low. In the past few days, the unit – which usually has a capacity of 920MW – has been running at capacity of about 600MW. Eskom is also chasing a deadline of 2024 to replace steam generators on both units to comply with licence conditions.
The replacement of the steam generators will enable the 40-year-old plant to extend its life by 20 years.
“While Eskom is ready to commence with the outage, with the contractors and all the requisite resources on standby, grid stability is an important consideration prior to shutting down the Unit 1 reactor to commence the maintenance and refuelling outage,” said Sadika Touffie, acting chief nuclear officer.
“This is going to be a long but necessary outage – the first of its kind for Koeberg. Eskom has taken care to ensure no undue delays are experienced once the project gets under way.”
The outage will last approximately six months, after which the second unit will be taken down. An earlier attempt to take Unit 2 out in January for life-extension refurbishment was aborted when not all facilities were in place.
Eskom warned that the extended unavailability of Koeberg will mean the electricity supply system will be under additional strain during the outage.
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