The year gone by and the year ahead for Ringhals
The year 2010 will not go down in history as one of the best ones for Ringhals. Annual production was still in spite of this about 24 billion kilowatt hours – a sixth of Sweden’s electricity consumption.
We achieved this production result despite two out of four reactors being shut down during the first quarter of the year. The shutdowns were necessary to carry out major safety improvements and modernisation work at Ringhals 1 and 2. Now when we look back we can conclude that the modernisation work was successful. All equipment works well and both reactors are equipped for safe and stable operation for many years to come.
Unfortunately the extended outages depicted Ringhals as being repeatedly offline during the winter period, but this is not the case.
If one looks at the first decade in the 2000s, Ringhals average availability for the period from November to March is around 90% with the extreme conditions of last year taken into account.
Challenges in 2011
There are also many substantial challenges in 2011. The largest assignment is the replacement of steam generators and pressurizer at Ringhals 4 – a more than 3 month-long outage. It is a gigantic project but also one we have carried out before, meeting the deadline with success. One of the low pressure turbines at Ringhals 1 has to be replaced this year, a long awaited replacement as the old turbines have been the cause of extended outages in recent years. The auxiliary feed water pumps at Ringhals 2 will be replaced which will allow us to reach full output again after running at 94% in recent years.
Always putting safety first
In spite of these major assignments, it is our safety work that is vital and of greatest significance. Our focus and objective is to attain world class safety, and we are fully determined to reach this goal in the near future. A number of measures have already been put in place and there are many more in the pipeline to rectify the faults pointed out to us by the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority. Work is also underway according to the recommendations outlined by IAEA at last year’s OSART inspection. A so-called "follow up" will be implemented at the end of 2011, and the improvements we put in place will then be disclosed.
2011 has kicked off with all four reactors operating in an orderly and stable fashion, and it is our aim to maintain this level of operation until this year’s outage period at Ringhals.
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