Updated October 16, 2018

One of the three units at Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant near Huntsville has been shut down for scheduled maintenance as part of a $475 million upgrade at the Limestone County facility.

TVA announced Monday that Unit 1 at Browns Ferry started a refueling and maintenance outage Sunday. The federally-owned utility is using the outage as an opportunity to bring it up to the level of Extended Power Uprate.

Once the EPU level is in place on all three units, Browns Ferry will generate an additional 465 megawatts, which TVA said was enough to power an additional 280,000 homes.

During this outage, TVA said it will install 332 new nuclear fuel assemblies and perform a final round of EPU modifications to prepare Unit 1 to become the second of the three Browns Ferry units to generate an additional 155 megawatts of electricity. The final EPU modifications will be installed on Unit 2 next spring.