Nuclear plant back at full power after outage

Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant’s Unit 1 reactor returned to full power at 9:32 p.m. Tuesday after completing a scheduled maintenance and refueling outage.

During the outage, which began Oct. 23, about 600 contractors helped plant staff complete maintenance tasks to prepare the unit for its next operating cycle and replaced one-third of the unit’s fuel.

Each of the nuclear plant’s two 550-megawatt reactors is refueled about once every 18 months.