SPRING CITY, TN – The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant Unit 2 began a scheduled refueling and maintenance outage on Saturday, April 13, after producing more than 13.5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity over the past 18 months.

“Our work during the first outage allowed Watts Bar Unit 2 to generate safe, low-cost, carbon-free nuclear energy to reliably power daily life across the Tennessee Valley for 492 days,” said Tony Williams, site vice president. “During this outage, we will focus on safely improving our plant systems to deliver the next 18 months of safe, reliable service for the Valley.”

An additional 900 TVA and contract employees are supplementing the site’s regular staff during the outage. Almost 10,000 work activities are planned, including loading new fuel assemblies, performing inspections of the unit’s reactor equipment and steam generators, maintenance of plant equipment and additional equipment upgrades.

Watt Bar’s two units produce enough power for 1.3 million homes. TVA also operates three units at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant near Decatur, Alabama, and two units at Sequoyah Nuclear Plant near Soddy Daisy, Tennessee. Collectively, TVA’s nuclear fleet reliably provides approximately 40 percent of the low-cost, carbon-free electricity used across the Valley.