Page 26 - May-June 2013

Dose
Management
Challenges
By Pete Orphanos, Exelon Generation.
Pete Orphanos
As the Vice President of Fleet Support
for Exelon Generation, Orphanos
is responsible
for Radiation
Protection,
Chemistry,
Operations,
Emergency
Preparedness and
Environmental at
Exelon’s 10 nuclear
sites. Prior to his
current assignment,
Orphanos served
in various roles
at the Limerick,
Peach Bottom
and Oyster Creek
generating stations, including Director
of Operations at both Limerick and
Oyster Creek, and Plant Manager at
Oyster Creek. He held a Senior Reactor
Operator license at Limerick and a
Fuel Handling Senior Reactor Operator
license at both Limerick and Peach
Bottom.
Mr. Orphanos earned a bachelor’s
degree in Nuclear Engineering
Technology from the University of the
State of New York and a bachelor’s
degree in education from Southern
Illinois University.
Response to questions by Newal
Agnihotri, Editor of Nuclear Plant
Journal.
1. What is the structure of Exelon’s
ALARA Radiation Advisory Committee?
Does it include health physics
professionals from outside the company.
Also, what is the scope of Advisory
Committee’s responsibilities?
The structure of Exelon’s ALARA
Advisory committee includes both a site
and corporate role. At each site, there is
a site committee that is comprised of the
senior leadership from all disciplines. The
site ALARA committees are chaired by
the site vice president or plant manager.
The primary responsibility of the site
ALARA committee is to ensure that the
dose is maintained ALARA at a site level.
These actions include development of
strategic, long range
dose reduction plans
and tactical actions
to reduce personnel
exposure on day-to-
day evolutions.
At Exelon, there
is also a corporate
ALARA commit-
tee, chaired by the
vice president of
fleet support, which
includes senior ex-
ecutives of the cor-
poration, all site
vice presidents, and
site radiation protection managers. The
corporate ALARA committee provides
oversight of the site reduction efforts and
develops fleet initiatives for dose reduc-
tion.
2. What software is used in ensuring
that interferences are avoided during the
planning phase of an outage management
to ensure minimum radiation dose?
Exelon uses several functions to
ensure that interferences are avoided
during the planning phase of work to
reduce outage dose. First is the Exelon
scheduling tool. These programs are used
to establish the correct sequence for work
and apply the appropriate logic ties in
the outage schedules. These schedules
are challenged by multi-discipline work
teams to review interferences, develop
the optimum schedule for the work, and
ensure that the appropriate prerequisites
are included in the schedule. These
actions have ensured that appropriate
ALARA flushes of systems are scheduled
to reduce work area dose rates prior to
work, such as flushing of vessel nozzles
prior to performing in-service inspections
on the nozzles during an outage.
3. What incentives or recognition
programsareofferedbyExelon tomotivate
groups of employees or contractors
towards achieving dose reduction goals?
Each site has an ALARA incentive
program to encourage employees to
reduce dose. These programs reward
employees for submitting ALARA
suggestions and implementation of dose
reduction ideas. The rewards include
everything from big screen TVs to
gift cards. These site programs have
resulted in significant savings, especially
during refuel outages where sites have
saved more than 10 person-rem each
outage because of dose reduction ideas.
An example of an action implemented
as a result of these programs is the
development of a new diving platform
for use in the suppression pool. Using the
platform resulted in significant savings
for outage dose and reduced the overall
duration to perform the suppression pool
diving during a recent outage at one of
the Exelon stations.
Additionally, Exelon has developed
an innovation reward program that
recognizes these recent innovations at a
meeting with the Chief Nuclear Officer.
In all, there were more than 196 specific
items developed within the fleet. At this
meeting, the top practices are recognized
for fleet wide innovation awards. During
the recent award ceremony, six of the
15 practices recognized were submitted
solely for dose reduction benefits that
were achieved. These included items
from improved use of robots for at
power inspections in PWRs and cleaning
radwaste vaults to improved methods
for diving in the suppression pool, and
practices to improve dressout for a torus
recoat project.
Clearly, through this mechanism and
the ALARA suggestion program, Exelon
values employee input and innovation to
reduce collective radiation exposure and
improve worker performance.
26 NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, May-June 2013