Refueling, maintenance outage to be held in the spring.

Port Gibson, Miss. –Representatives from Grand Gulf Nuclear Plant and Entergy Mississippi, Inc. provided an overview of the company’s many community activities for 2009 and a brief look ahead at 2010 during a recent Port Gibson Community meeting held at City Hall.

Site Vice President Randy Douet recapped Grand Gulf’s successes for the previous year, including remaining continuously online since Oct. 30, 2008, and generating 11,437,955 megawatt hours of electricity. Both were best-ever records for the plant.

“Now, what do these records mean for you?” Douet asked the meeting participants. “That Grand Gulf is supplying its customers with safe, reliable, low-cost electricity.”
In addition, Douet announced that the plant’s next refueling outage would be held in the spring.

“In basic terms, a refueling outage is when we do three main things at the nuclear plant: replace one third of our fuel, perform scheduled equipment inspections, and complete maintenance work that can’t be done while the plant is online,” said Douet.

“This outage will further solidify Grand Gulf as a safe, reliable source of electricity,” he added.

Some of the activities taking place during the outage support the company’s recently announced plans to upgrade the plant to produce more electricity. Completion of the upgrade will take place during another planned outage in 2012. Once complete, the upgrade will increase Grand Gulf’s power output by 10 percent, making the plant the largest megawatt producer in the nation.

While an outage is a necessary part of plant operations, it’s also a boost to the local economy. More than 1,000 contract workers come to the Port Gibson area to support outage activities.

“As a byproduct of the outage, many businesses in our area will reap the benefits of having extra people spending their money. This is a great temporary boon to our economy,” said Claiborne County Administrator James Johnston.

Supporting the community is also a key mission of Entergy, as the company gave $335,000 to local initiatives in 2009. Some of these included funding an economic development plan for Claiborne County, supporting the hiring of an economic developer, sponsoring a banquet for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, supporting the establishment of a Salvation Army field office in the county, and various education-related projects.

“We have been around for 101 years, and we greatly appreciate Entergy’s support,” said Gilbert Buck, president, NAACP, as he received a $3,000 check.

Ann Becker, manager of external affairs for Entergy Nuclear, explained that the donations constituted more than just financial support to local organizations and initiatives. “We are actively involved in everything that we’ve contributed to,” said Becker, “because we want Port Gibson to be the best it can possibly be.”

Entergy Corporation is an integrated energy company engaged primarily in electric power production and retail distribution operations. Entergy owns and operates power plants with approximately 30,000 megawatts of electric generating capacity, and it is the second-largest nuclear generator in the United States. Entergy delivers electricity to 2.7 million utility customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Entergy has annual revenues of more than $10 billion and approximately 15,000 employees.

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www.entergy-nuclear.com