Achieving
Long-
term Plant
Operation
By David Howell, Westinghouse Electric
Company.
David Howell
David Howell heads Westinghouse
Electric Company's Operating Plants
Business, where he has operational
responsibility for
all products and
services related
to operating plant
services including
Instrumentation and
control systems,
outage support and
plant modification
services as well
as engineering
products and
nuclear parts for
pressurized water
reactors and boiling
water reactors
worldwide. He
is a member of
the Westinghouse
Operating Committee and a past
member of the Westinghouse Board of
Directors.
He holds six patents for innovative
equipment serving this market, is a
certified Customer 1st Leader and
a black belt in Six Sigma and Lean
processes.
Mr. Howell holds a bachelor’s degree
in mechanical engineering from Geneva
College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania
(USA). He is a registered professional
engineer in Pennsylvania and is a
member of the Geneva College Advanced
Board.
An interview by Newal Agnihotri, Editor
of Nuclear Plant Journal, at the NRC’s
Regulatory Information Conference in
Bethesda, Maryland on March 8, 2016.
1.
How did Robotics evolve in
Westinghouse?
Robotics, on the service end, means
using robots to travel down underneath
the water in the reactor vessel or up into
the steam generator to perform service
work remotely. Automation is really
instrumentation and control (I&C). In
2010, Westinghouse did not have a stand-
alone automation business until I was
asked to grow our I&C business by lever-
aging the great experience we had with
operating plants and incorporating it into
a new plant automation business. This
gives great value to best support the I&C
of the AP1000
®
Nuclear Power Plant and
the APR1400s that we worked on with
Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. West-
inghouse has 24 new
plant units of digital
I&C systems under
contract ranging from
early stages of design/
procurement through
final stages of plant
start up. This work
is being performed
through digital I&C
centers of excellence
in Warrendale, Penn-
sylvania, and Shang-
hai, China.
2.
Describe the
new outage control
center in Madison,
Pennsylvania.
When you’re servicing a nuclear
plant outage, it’s a 24-hour-a-day, seven-
day-a-week critical path activity because
completing the outage work is what
stands between shut down for refuel-
ing and maintenance and going back to
power. To ensure that we are doing our
utmost to facilitate getting back to power
as planned, we created a central Westing-
house Outage Control Center (OCC) at
our Waltz Mill Field Services Center of
Excellence located in Madison, Pennsyl-
vania. It is similar to what our customers
have in their own OCCs with one differ-
ence. The customer’s OCC is focused
on their outage. The Westinghouse OCC
monitors the health of and provides sup-
port to all the outages Westinghouse is
supporting at a given time. We could be
monitoring as many as 15 different out-
ages on our OCC screens, with the ability
to focus on any one outage more closely,
as needed, on any given screen. We have
an OCC at our Waltz Mill site to manage
the outages within the US, and we have a
second center in Orsay, France, to man-
age outages across Europe.
In the Westinghouse OCC, we have
live feeds from plants so that we can see
and monitor all the activities in plants
where we are doing outage work.
If there’s any support our field
personnel need, they have immediate
access to home office subject matter
experts. Critical activities at any outage
that we’re servicing are tracked on large
displays within the center. The amount
of time these activities should require for
completion is also tracked.
Additionally, we receive warnings
if work is taking longer than normal, or
going a little quicker. These warnings
help us advise our field personnel on how
to adjust and keep the plan on schedule.
If there are any emergent activities or
issues that need managed, we also have
immediate notification. We just had one
at a plant where there was an unexpected
indication found in a pressurizer nozzle.
Through our OCC, we were able to
mobilize our welding team from PCI
Energy Services to the site. The time it
took from when we heard about the issue
to the time the issue was corrected was
less than two weeks, which was a quick
response and resolution time for this
emergent repair activity. This is part
of the value of our OCC. We have live
communication during the outages as
they’re going on, and we can support any
emergent activity at the plants.
We are also now piloting what we
call our WEConnect system, which takes
advantage of tablet technology. With this
system, we will monitor the progress
on procedures and have oversight of the
work our field personnel are doing at the
plants. This technology will enable close
monitoring of progress and if the activity
is not progressing as planned, will allow
real-time supervisor oversight.
3.
How has this outage center kept up
with the state of the art technology, so
that all the young generation engineers
may feel comfortable with it?
Part of current real-time system
includes use of video cameras to provide
live video feed to the OCC. This allows
us to see exactly what is being worked
on at any given time. The video feed gets
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NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, March-April 2016
