A Global
Overview
By Jay Wileman, GE Hitachi Nuclear
Energy.
Jay Wileman
Jay Wileman serves as Senior Vice
President. Nuclear Plant Projects and
Chief Operating Officer, GE Hitachi
Nuclear Energy, a position he assumed
at the end of 2012.
Jay most recently led
GE Energy’s efforts
across Sub-Saharan
Africa, serving
as its President,
since 2009. He
led the team that
provides integrated
product and service
solutions that meet
Africa’s needs in oil,
natural gas, power
generation, water,
renewables and new
grid modernization.
A seasoned executive with more than
25 years’ experience, he has a wealth of
international knowledge, having led a
great number of global teams to success
across the energy spectrum while on
assignment.
Jay received his Bachelor of Science in
Nuclear Engineering from Mississippi
State University and his Master’s Degree
in Business Administration from the
University of Alabama in Birmingham.
An interview by Newal Agnihotri, Editor
of Nuclear Plant Journal, at Nuclear
Energy Institute’s Nuclear Energy
Assembly in Washington, D.C. on May
13, 2015.
1.
Please provide an overview of GE
Hitachi Nuclear’s currently announced
PWR service business.
If you step back a moment and
you look at the installed base around
the world, it’s a numerical fact that
it’s about one-third BWR. It’s about
two-thirds PWR. We have developed
a lot of expertise over the years around
supporting our customers and outages in
helping to reduce what was many tens of
days for an outage down to best in class
of sub-20-day outages, and we’re running
in the low 20s.
And we’ve developed a lot of skills
around tooling to support the mainte-
nance, a lot of great innovations around
inspection services,
really, the under-
standing of how to do
things for very low
dose, because that’s
a key metric for our
customers,
around
how to have a very
robust schedule. We
bring a toolkit that,
when you think about
it, isn’t just for BWRs.
The same exact expe-
rience, learnings and
skills, apply perfectly
well in the PWR fleet.
And so, really understanding that a lot of
our customers now have both boiling wa-
ter reactors and pressurized water reac-
tors in their fleets, that’s important for us
to expand that relationship and help them
there. We are very happy that Exelon has
given us an opportunity to demonstrate
that experience and expertise to do things
very efficiently and take that to the whole
PWR fleet.
2.
What services does GE Hitachi
Nuclear plan to provide to the PWR
services?
We are bringing our expertise
that we do on their other boiling water
reactors to that and it would also include
things like refuel floor management and
eventually expanding other services.
There are PWRs worldwide. Certainly,
our launch is here in the US with Exelon,
but we would be looking to expand
globally. As we open up our skills and
expertise to the broader PWR market
we would love to partner with potential
customers that value our technology,
our expertise and our resume of helping
deliver great outages. We have worked in
collaboration with Exelon. They had a
very strong management commitment to
excellence in outages. Exelon was getting
sub-20-day outages. It’s a logical way
of thinking. Don’t do things during an
outage that you don’t have to. Make sure
you’ve got everything planned. Make
sure you’ve got everybody practiced.
Make sure you bring the best technology,
the best expertise and experience as well.
If you also look at the capacity factors of
nuclear in the ‘70s and ‘80s they were
below the 92%-93% range that we see
now.
3.
What turbine generator services do
you offer?
We already do turbine generators
on PWRs. There are GE steam turbines
attached to pressurized water reactors.
4.
What’s the status of PRISM?
We continue to work with the
Nuclear Decommissioning Authority
(NDA) in the United Kingdom on
evolving their understanding and drilling
into the scoping of PRISM to apply it
to the disposition of plutonium, which
is a national policy for them. They
obviously are taking our information
and doing their own internal evaluations
within their system. As we continue to
work with them we’re very, very pleased
with our collaboration there, but the new
news is the US Department of Energy
released funding – a more than $2 million
investment to refresh the probabilistic
risk assessment (PRA) for PRISM. We’ve
had a model in place, but two years ago
the American Nuclear Society issued a
new standard for these assessments that is
specific to advanced reactors like PRISM.
So we’re going through to reapply that
to the current PRISM design. It’s great
because that gives you an updated model
of your whole system. We’re very excited
and very happy that DOE is focusing their
interest on PRISM. They clearly have an
interest in forwarding that technology. In
addition to the PRA work another area
of technology that we are drilling further
into for PRISM is EM, or electromagnetic
pumps. This type of pump doesn’t need a
rotating shaft penetration into the reactor
which allows PRISM to have a very high
integrity welded seal to contain its core.
We received a grant there as well to go and
do some work. So, we’re collaborating
with the DOE labs as well as our own
36
NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, July-August 2015
