Unit 1 of the Cook nuclear power plant is now back online having completed its latest refueling outage.

The Cook plant says the outage started March 22, and Unit 1 was reconnected to the transmission grid Wednesday afternoon.

Cook plant spokesperson Joe Callahan told us last month there were a few major projects on the agenda for this latest outage. For example…

“The replacement of the motor on our reactor cooling pumps,” Callahan said. “So the reactor cooling pump is a critical part, a critical component, and it’s responsible for circulating the primary coolant through the reactor core.”

Crews also did regular maintenance work, inspected the main turbine and main generator, and replaced battery systems. It took a lot of extra contractors on site to get all of the maintenance work done in 39 days.

“We have about a thousand or so additional contract workers here on site at Cook that are assisting our regular plant staff with this refueling outage.”

During the outage, about 12,500 maintenance, inspection, and equipment jobs totaling 179,000 work-hours were completed through two daily 12-hour shifts. American Electric Power Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer Kelly Ferneau says this was “another very successful refueling outage.”

Throughout the outage, Cook’s Unit 2 reactor remained at full power.