Located on an 1,100-acre site on Lake Erie, 65km northeast of Cleveland in North Perry, the power plant features single unit boiling water reactor that can produce electricity required to power more than one million homes.

During the outage, the company will replace 280 of the 748 fuel assemblies and carry out safety inspections on the unit’s reactor vessel, turbine and electrical generator.

The company will undertake preventative maintenance on major components, including testing of more than 130 valves, replacing several control rod blades and inspecting and cleaning cooling tower piping.

FirstEnergy will deploy a new transformer, which is one of two circuits that provide power from the off-site transmission network to the plant’s on-site electrical systems.

Perry plant underwent its last refueling in May 2013, and generated more than 18.6 million megawatt hours of electricity since then.