DATE: Tuesday, November 4, 1997             TAG: 9711040315

SECTION: BUSINESS                PAGE: D1   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: BY AKWELI PARKER, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   47 lines

VA. POWER REPORTS SURRY REACTOR UP AND RUNNING BETTER PREPARATION IN REFUELING BREAKS COMPANY RECORD.

Workers at Virginia Power's Surry nuclear station are glowing, but not because of any radiation exposure.

The company said its Surry 2 nuclear reactor was to reach full power Monday after shutting down for a refueling that took only 25 days - a company record.

That number stands in contrast to the 56-day hiatus taken by the company's Surry 1 reactor last March and April. It had been scheduled to last 35 days.

Each day a reactor spends offline costs the company about $250,000.

Enough days offline and customers could see bill increases. Industrywide, refueling averages about 50 days.

``We as a station were certainly somewhat disappointed with the(spring) outage,'' said Bryce Shriver, assistant station manager at Surry.

``It was very clear that we wanted to do better.''

Through teamwork and better preparation, they got their wish. During a refueling, employees replace about a third of a reactor's uranium fuel rods and perform a complicated ballet of maintenance duties.

``We had a much more detailed plan this time than before,'' said Shriver. It included communicating the outage's importance to employees at all levels and making cleaner handoffs as tasks progressed from one team to another.

The previous company record was 30 days, set at the company's North Anna power station in 1996.

The refueling also broke a company record for the amount of radiation workers avoided.

About a third of Virginia Power's electricity comes from its nuclear plants, compared to about 20 percent for nuclear plants nationwide.

After a troubled period in the late 1980s, the company's nuclear operations have come to be regarded among the nation's best. As part of across-the-board cost cutting, the company has wrung unheard-of efficiency from its nuclear division. In June, the Utility Data Institute ranked Virginia Power's nuclear plants tops in the nation for producing cheap power in 1996.

Even as industry competition threatens to make nuclear plants too expensive for utilities to operate, Virginia Power said it owes its stable rates in large part to the efficiency of its nuclear stations and plans to extend the licenses of its reactors in 2012 for another 20 years. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Bill Tiernan/File photo

Surry Unit 2 at Virginia Power...

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