Every Outage Finally Has a Name

[Rennhack]

Every Outage Finally Has a Name

If you have worked an outage, you know it has a name. Nobody at the tool crib says "the spring outage at Catawba." They say C1R28. It is on the badge, on the schedule, on the coffee cup somebody had printed.

For years, right here on NukeWorker, every one of those outages was a date range and a colored bar. "Catawba 1, March 2026." Technically true. Totally soulless.

That bugged me. So we went and got the names.

The hunt

Here is the thing nobody tells you: there is no master list. Nowhere can you download a tidy file where some kind soul has written down that Turkey Point 3's spring outage was TP3-35 and Surry 2's was EOC33.

What there is: tens of thousands of NRC inspection reports, licensee event reports, and utility letters, scanned and OCR'd and scattered across a public archive. Buried in the prose, some inspector typed "the unit entered refueling outage 1R29" and moved on with his day, never knowing he was leaving a breadcrumb.

We read a lot of breadcrumbs. Fifteen thousand documents worth.

Every site is a special snowflake 

Here is where it got fun. Nobody names these things the same way.

Braidwood writes A1R25. Cook writes U1C34. Turkey Point writes TP3-35. Surry writes EOC33. St. Lucie writes SL2-29. All perfectly sensible, all completely different.

And then there is Susquehanna, which writes U124RIO.

That one stopped me cold. I was certain the scanner had chewed it. It had to be RFO, right? F and I are one bad pixel apart. So we went looking, and Susquehanna does not have refueling outages. Susquehanna has Refueling and Inspection Outages. RIO. Unit 1, cycle 24, RIO. It shows up spelled that way one hundred thirty eight times in the record and never once as RFO. The plant was right. I was wrong. That is usually how it goes.

Palo Verde deserves a mention too. Three units behind one fence, and they printed three different conventions for them. Unit 1 said 1R25 while units 2 and 3 said RFO. Same site. Same schedule. Fixed now, along with six other plants that were quietly disagreeing with themselves.

The one letter that cracked Fort Calhoun

Fort Calhoun was the stubborn one. Shut down since 2016, records thin, nothing lined up.

Then a 2015 letter from OPPD turned up, discussing deferring some work "from Fort Calhoun Unit 1 Refueling Outage 27 (FC1R27) to Refueling Outage 28 (FC1R28)." Two outage names, one sentence, and a whole unit's history fell into place. Somebody's routine correspondence, filed and forgotten, and eleven years later it was exactly what we needed.

What you get

Every refueling outage in our records now carries the plant's own name for it. Outage history, the season schedule, unit pages, facility pages, the status map, and the data exports. Hover any badge and it will tell you in plain English what it means, because U124RIO deserves an explanation.

And a bonus

Breaker to breaker runs are named now too, bounded by the outages on either end: M1R27 to M1R28. And when a unit strings two together back to back, we say so. Millstone 2 has a double breaker to breaker, 2R28 to 2R29 to 2R30. Two full fuel cycles, no unplanned stops. That is a heck of a run and it deserved better than two dates in a table.

Go poke around. Tell me what you think.