During a month long outage, Krško's owner NEK said some 45,000 activities will be carried out in a package of work it described as an 'overhaul'. NEK said a total of 2100 people would be involved in preventative maintenance, inspections and refuelling as well as an operation to increase Krsko's power output of 633 MWe by 10-12 MWe by replacing the high pressure steam turbine with a new model.

 

As well as preparing the reactor unit for its next run of power generation, the overhaul is preparing Krško for a periodic safety assessment next year. If regulators are satisfied with its condition and NEK's operational competence, Krsko will be granted permission to operate for a further 10 years to 2033. In due course, NEK intends to go for a further ten years, taking the reactor's planned shutdown to 2043. An environmental impact assessment for this has already been submitted to the Ministry of the Environment and Spatial Planning.

 

NEK noted that spending on Krško's long term operation fits the criteria for 'green' investment under the EU Taxonomy.

Fuel assemblies are removed, added and rearranged one by one above the reactor core (Image: NEK)

Krško is a Westinghouse pressurised water reactor located on the Sava river. It is unusual in being jointly owned by two countries: Slovenia, where it is located, and Croatia, both of which were parts of the former Yugoslavia when Krško came online in 1981. It supplies as much as 40% of Slovenia's electricity and has operated reliably, having three times completed uninterrupted runs of 500 days of power generation including immediately before this outage.