CRYSTAL RIVER - Progress Energy's Crystal River nuclear plant returned to service Wednesday following a 32-day outage. The planned outage was the second-shortest ever for the Crystal River plant. It was also the shortest period of time a U.S. nuclear power plant has ever been shut down to replace a head. Besides replacing the reactor pressure vessel head, workers used the outage to replace one-third of the fuel in the nuclear reactor, install a new tube cleaning system in two of the plant's four condensers, inspect major components such as the steam generators and perform maintenance on plant systems. "This outage had a very large scope of work," said Dale Young, vice president of the Crystal River plant. "Completing it within this time is a credit to the planning that went into the outage and the way employees responded to the challenges they faced in completing the amount of work."
Native grasses to be featured at meeting
CRYSTAL RIVER - The Citrus chapter of the Florida Native Plant Society will have its next meeting at 7 p.m. Monday. The featured speaker will be Mary Anne Gonter of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She will be talking about native grasses of the Citrus County area. The society also will host a book signing and limited edition print sale by Susan Trammell, who will sell and sign the newly released full color book, Florida's Best Native Landscape Plants by Dr. Gil Nelson. There also will be a presentation about the plant of the month. The meeting is open to anyone who has an interest in the nature of the Citrus County area. The society meets in the cafeteria of the Lecanto Middle School, 3800 Educational Path, Lecanto. Call Jim Bierly at 382-3365.
