The electricians that work for my employer like it when the local nuke plant does a shutdown. They tend to get quite a bit of OT.
I'm having an unexpected weekend off to do being slow at work, and me not wanting to work in a different department.
Back in the early days of nuclear power, it wasn't all that unusual for a plant to go down for one reason or another every 60-90 days. Now, it's expected that a plant will go "breaker-to-breaker", i.e., no forced outages during the entire fuel cycle, which on a typical nuke plant, goes about 18 months, some even longer. Nuke plants are considered "base load", meaning they run 100 percent, 100 percent of the time. Our expected availability is over 98 percent. Compare that to the 60 or so percent of a conventional plant.
We just hit 420 days online (and will, if we do the entire cycle, knock on wood, be over 500 days by the outage) and as managment has told us, this is when it gets fun trying to keep stuff running so we don't have to shut down.
