Cook Plant back online

The Cook Nuclear Power Plant in southwest Michigan is back online. Indiana Michigan Power fired up the reactor on Unit 1 Sunday night after a refueling outage that started on March 27. The nearly 54-day outage was longer than normal to allow for planned maintenance work to the reactor vessel’s internal support structure. Before the refueling, the reactor ran for 518 consecutive days, topping the 1994 record of 471 days. One of the projects was to repair bolts in the reactor vessel’s internal support structure, which had been identified as damaged during a previous refueling. When it’s running at full capacity, the Cook plant located just north of Bridgman in Berrien County can power 1.5 million homes.  (MRN)