July-August 2018 NPJ

56 NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, July-August 2018 Vince Elias Vince Elias has more than 15 years of experience in the nuclear power industry and most currently with Westinghouse Electric Company in the installation, mitigation and repair services area. Mr. Elias has held varied and progressively responsible positions as a manager in product management, sales and marketing in the Americas and Asia regions. Prior to his career with Westinghouse, Mr. Elias served as a principal engineer in Plant Engineering, and was a fluid systems engineer and senior systems engineer at D.C. Cook Nuclear Plant. He has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Point Park University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. also leaves behind a smooth surface that has proven not to interfere with follow-up nondestructive examinations, which helps plants avoid costly rework and negative schedule impacts. Additionally, with laser peening, Westinghouse provides customers a verifiable, validated digital record of the exact parameters of the laser peening performed, including the locations and essential process parameters in the forms of data and video. This data enables the regulatory authority to verify peening effectiveness for plants seeking approval of extended inspection intervals. The innovative approach also allows Westinghouse to access locations that other conventional mitigation methods cannot reach. As a planned outage activity, under- water laser peening can increase efficiency by cross-utilizing refueling crews. For ex- ample, the majority of personnel involved in deploying underwater laser peening are drawn from other on-site maintenance teams, teams that would otherwise be idle or demobilized during the schedule win- dow for performing underwater laser peen- ing. Effective planning for cross-utilization creates a more consistent workflow for resources over the plant’s entire outage window, minimizing demobilization and turnover of personnel while also raising productivity over a prolonged period. Ad- ditionally, laser peening tools can be used simultaneously in the same space, leading to a possible reduc- tion in critical path outage time – another important consider- ation when perform- ing maintenance work during scheduled plant outages. Laser peen- ing has proven to be a cost-effective as- set management ap- proach. It mitigates stress corrosion crack- ing for the duration of plant operation in both pressurized and boiling water reactors. When considering the overall expense of an emergent repair, which includes the fi- nancial impact of an unexpected outage or an unplanned increase to outage schedule, replacement power cost and emergent re- pair cost, plants can potentially realize the return on investment with proactive laser peening in as few as two emergent repair scenarios. In addition, if stress corrosion led to a leak then a volumetric inspec- tion would be needed; this requires core offload. The costs to address such issues could reach more than $1 million. Underwater laser peening keeps radiation dose to workers low and can be applied wherever primary water stress corrosion cracking is present in any reactor type. In order to ensure its field teams are familiar with any situation before performing the work at site, Westinghouse creates a mock-up and conducts training and qualification at its Field Services Center of Excellence in Madison, Pennsylvania, where customers witness the qualification. As plants perform their regular Electric Power Research Institute Materials Reliability Program (MRP) MRP-227 inspections, theymay eventually face the decision to repair or monitor any existing stress corrosion cracks or the beginnings of newly discovered cracks. The application of laser peening can benefit utilities seeking to safely and cost- effectively extend the life of their reactor vessel internals for 60 years or more. Contact: Donna Ruff, Westinghouse Electric Company, telephone: (412) 374- 4705, email: ruffdl@westinghouse.com. Testing and qualification of laser peening on bottom-mounted instrumentation nozzles in a reactor vessel mock-up at the Westinghouse Field Services Center of Excellence. Laser Peening... ( Continued from page 54)