I thought most nuclear plants planned refueling and maintenance in the winter when electricity demand is low. There seems to be a lot of nuclear plants down for maintenance and/or refueling staring in the Spring.

THE NRC Web site

-- slza (slzattas@erols.com), May 10, 2001

Answers

Most power plants (all types) have an outage schedule. Each generating unit at each plant is usually scheduled for two planned outages each year -- one in the fall, before the winter increased demand for electricity where it is used for heating and longer nights, and one in the spring, before the summer demand for cooling.

Usually one of the individual unit outages coincides with a scheduled complete total plant outage (black plant outage) when items common to all generating units at the plant are serviced. This is to prepare for "On-Peak" demand

On-Peak generating in SoCal is June-September. Therefore, the spring outages are usually "black plant" to prepare everything for the peak demand season. I don't know if this is the way all parts of the country handle scheduled maintenance, but it is the way SoCal Edison always did it before they were forced to sell most of their generation capacity.

Hope this helps.

-- PHO (owennos@bigfoot.com), May 10, 2001.