Nuclear fuel management during refuelling activities in Almaraz NPP

Each nuclear refuelling must be studied and planned in detail; nuclear fuel management during the outage is critical for good, safe and economical nuclear power plant performance. This report identifies and describes the operations involved during the refuelling activities in Almaraz (CNA), from the reception of the fresh fuel, 3 months before the outage to the spent pool map verification 6 six months after. In order to achieve all the tasks, coordination of available resources and regulatory and technical requirements are required.

At the time of edition of this article, Almaraz will be in its twenty-ninth outage in U1. Almaraz has successfully completed from its connection in 1981 (U1) and 1983 (U2) a total of 55 refuelling outages.