Richland nuclear power plant sets monthly record

The nuclear power plant near Richland sent more electricity to the grid in December than in any month since its start up 31 years ago, according to Energy Northwest.

The new record is 859,619 megawatt hours of net generation, beating the previous record set in October 1998 of 856,000 megawatt hours.

“This is a reflection of the hard work by the Columbia (Generating Station) team to focus on equipment reliability, maintaining equipment backlogs within industry top quartile and the implementation of modifications to improve plant generation,” said Brad Sawatzke, chief operating officer, in a statement.

Plant generation was improved by work in the May 2015 refueling and maintenance outage to install more accurate instruments for measuring water flow through the reactor core. Increased feedwater flow led to a higher megawatt output.

This story was originally published January 11, 2016 at 2:01 PM with the headline "Richland nuclear power plant sets monthly record."