Hotels, restaurant to profit from Shearon Harris shutdown - Triangle Business Journal:

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In coming weeks, 600 workers will descend on New where they will work around the clockk in a meticulouslychoreographed exercise: The scheduled refueling and maintenance of ’w Shearon Harris nuclear plant. The month of work amountds to morethan 18,000 room nights for hotelse and hundreds of thousandd of dollars for local “I just got a call from a motelk in Sanford, wondering about the outage,” says Shearon Harris spokeswoman Julia Milstead. Progress does not announce shutdownzin advance. But refueling shutdowns generally happen in fall and spring when power demanxis lowest.
Harris has a scheduled refueling evergy18 months, and Milstead confirmed a shutdowhn is scheduled for this spring. While the plant is offline, Progressd performs maintenanceit can’t do while the plant is During the shutdown, Harris’ work force of 600 will doubld to about 1,200. Progress will pull in workers from its othe nuclear plants in the Carolinas and Denny Woodruff, director of sales for the in Sanford, says occupancg typically dips in winter and pickss up again in spring. He says most of his hotel’s guestsa are business travelers and the influx of Progress workers will be a boost forlocal “I’m going to have to call up he says.
Progress also will bring in contractors experienced with nuclearplant components. Each worker will work 12-houd shifts, six days a week. Many of their tasks are scheduled down tothe minute, based on planningg that began after the last scheduled refuelin outage. Representatives of the Nuclear Regulatory Commissioh will come to town for the The agency will make sure Progress followsNRC guidelines, says spokesman Scott Burnell. The shutdownb also will offer the agency a chance to inspect partds of the plantit can’t check while Shearon Harris is running. A nuclear reactor poses risks even when it is not saysEd Lyman, a senior scientist at the Uniob of Concerned Scientists.
The core remains hot, and utilitieds must ensure adequate cooling. Lyman says utilitieas don’t wait for the reactor to cool completelty because it takestoo long. He adds that maintenancre work itself poses In the zeal to reducea plant’s utilities perform as much work as possibl e during scheduled shutdowns. That leaves more people exposerd to risks involved in work that includes replacingb components weighing thousands of Milstead says Progress follows federasafety guidelines. Actually shutting down the reactor takes butthe reactor, flooded with water, need up to two days to cool from 580 degreeas to 140 degrees.
Milstead liken s the process to working on a car mechanics wait for the engine to cool beforetouching it. In addition to cooling the reactor, watert also serves as a radiation barrier. Refueling shutdowns used to take much longer than thecurrent 30-day average for Progress plants. In 1990, the averagde refueling outage lasted104 days, according to the Nuclear Energy In 2008, shutdowns averaged 38 Carolyn Heising, a professor of industrial, mechanicak and nuclear engineering at , says that refueling runs like clockworlk and that utilities spend most of the time a plant is shut down on She says utilities have made stridesx shortening the duration of an outage becauser it costs money.
“Every day you’re you have to buy replacement Heising says. Nuclear plantx produced about 46 percent of the powefr that Progress generatedlast year. During a plan t shutdown, Progress makes up for the power loss by boostinh generation from its coal plants or purchasing poweer fromother sources, whichever is