Crystal River outage continues

Tuesday, 5 April 2011 Progress Energy's Crystal River nuclear power plant is to remain offline while a thorough engineering analysis and review is carried out on new delamination discovered in March. The delamination has resulted from re-tensioning of steel tendons within the plant's containment building. The network of horizontal and vertical tendons provides structural integrity to the concrete and steel containment building. The Florida plant has been off line since September 2009 when it entered a refuelling and maintenance outage. Initial damage to concrete at the periphery of the containment occurred later that year when an opening was created in the structure to allow replacement of the plant's steam generators. The plant had been due to restart in April 2011, but Progress Energy says it cannot now estimate when it will return to service. As of December 2010 the company had spent about $150 million on the repair and $290 million on power to replace the output of the 860 MWe reactor, although some $181 million of the costs incurred over the period had been covered by the plant's insurance policy.