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NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, July-August 2016
Centers of
Excellence
By Jon Ball, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy.
Jon Ball
Jon Ball is Executive Vice President of
Nuclear Plant Projects for GE Hitachi
Nuclear Energy, a position he assumed
in November 2015. In this role he leads
the development
and execution of
new plant strategies
globally.
Jon has been a
leader in the nuclear
industry for more
than 20 years and
has a wide-range
of experience in
manufacturing,
global operations,
services, quality
and Profit & Loss
leadership.
From 2012-2015 Jon
served as Senior Vice
President, Global
Supply Chain, where he led more than
1,000 GEH employees worldwide in
manufacturing and logistics. Prior to
that Jon spent seven years in services
where he led both the performance
services and field services segments.
Before that he spent seven years with
Global Nuclear Fuel, a joint venture
majority owned by GE, serving in
several positions including global supply
chain leader, quality manager and lab
manager.
Jon is a Six Sigma Master Black Belt
with a B.S. in Chemistry from Pacific
Lutheran University and a Ph.D.
in Analytical Chemistry from The
Pennsylvania State University.
An interview by Newal Agnihotri, Editor
of Nuclear Plant Journal, at the Nuclear
Energy Institute’s Nuclear Energy Assembly
in Miami, Florida on May 25, 2016.
1.
How is GE Hitachi helping the
utilities bring down the operating and
maintenance costs?
For many years, we’ve been
committed to trying to drive cost
improvements, but the industry today
is at a pivotal point, especially due to
natural gas prices. In order to survive
going forward, the industry will need
to make step change improvements.
We’re supporting the industry efforts
in “Delivering the Nuclear Promise”
strategic plan, and they’ve set lofty
goals, including a 30 percent reduction in
electric generating costs. At GEH we’ve
got to be thinking
about some pretty
dramatic changes to
help our customers to
achieve that kind of
cost out target.
To think really
big, we believe the
digital solutions that
we have, leveraging
GE’s Predix platform,
have the ability to
drive out cost and
increase generation.
The
Predix
platform is to the
Industrial Internet as
iOS is to the iPhone.
It’ll be the platform
in which data is
stored, transmitted, and applications
and analytics are performed. GE has
invested in this platform more than any
other industrial company and more
than any other software company. As a
nuclear business we have a very unique
opportunity to leverage the incredible
investment that GE has made in this
platform.
If you can get just one percent
improvement from, let’s say, additional
output, a typical operating plant can
generate another $10-15 million of
revenue through that one percent. In
the new plant space, we want to create
what’s called the digital nuclear power
plant. This concept is to digitize the
entire plant so that we can detect and do
condition monitoring on equipment in the
balance of plant, the turbine island and
the nuclear island and look for anomalies
in how the equipment is operating. With
advanced analytics, we can see that.
Typical operators can’t see that because
the anomalies can be subtle, disguised or
non-linear in nature. If you can see those
issues and shutdown proactively, you can
avoid significant cost. When a plant goes
down, it costs about $1 million a day, and
those are the kinds of things we’re trying
to avoid through digital and advanced
analytical solutions.
2.
What are the different applications
currently in use as part of Predix?
The main application is called
Asset Performance Management or
APM. Through this technology you
can add sensors to a variety of pieces
of equipment. You can measure things
like temperature, pressure and vibration
to try to detect potential failures before
they happen. Those are the kinds of
applications that are being deployed that
we plan on leveraging.
3.
Are you developing robotics
capabilities?
We have a network of global
research centers, one in NewYork, one in
China and a satellite in Detroit that have
robotics centers of excellence. These
centers are developing collaborative
robots that can work aside/along people,
or ones that may be like a remotely
operated vehicle. We’ve worked closely
with the centers to leverage some of the
technology, the learnings they have. Our
inspection business has been leading
the development and implementation of
these remotely operated vehicles.
4.
HowdoesGEHitachi minimize outage
cost and utilize robots in inspections?
A great way to take cost down is to
make outages more efficient and reduce
the outage time. Through some of the
advanced tooling that we’ve developed,
we are enabling our customers to do
that. We’ve got an in-vessel visual
inspection tool called Stinger. This tool
eliminates critical path time by doing
visual inspections at the same time as
fuel movement. In addition, it requires
fewer operators. So not only do you save
critical path, you use fewer operators
for additional cost savings. In addition,
you’re removing the operators away from
the cavity – they’re sitting in a tent away
– so they get lower dose. And when you
lower dose, you can assign dollar value to
