May-June 2018 NPJ

Delivering Successful Projects By Bernard Fontana, Framatome. Bernard Fontana Bernard Fontana, Chairman of the Managing Board and Chief Executive Officer of Framatome since January 4th, 2018, holds a degree in engineering from the École Polytechnique and the École Nationale Supérieure des Techniques Avancées in Paris. He has 30 years’ experience in the chemical, steel and building materials industries (SNPE, ArcelorMittal, APERAM and Holcim). From February 2012 to September 2015, he served as CEO of Holcim Ltd. Since September 1, 2015, Bernard Fontana had been Chief Executive Officer of AREVA NP (now Framatome). An interview by Newal Agnihotri, Editor of Nuclear Plant Journal at the World Nuclear Association Symposium in London on September 14, 2017. 1. What are Framatome’s priorities now that it has joined the EDF Group? Today, Framatome’s priority, as a technology company, is to further strengthen our expertise and competencies in nuclear engineering and reactors in the long run. We emphasize our efforts in knowledge management, which is key for our workforce of highly trained professionals. A whole generation of our teams is commissioning the EPR reactors nowadays, and we want to capitalize on this experience. At the same time we want to take all the industrial lessons from the difficulties we faced in the past 10 years to further strengthen our industrial know-how. 2. You have recently broadened your Instru- mentation & Control portfolio. Could you tell us more about the I&C business of Framatome? An important part of our key offering for our customers is the transition to a digital safety Instrumenta- tion & Control sys- tem. We believe that it adds significant im- provement to the op- erations of the plants, provides more mar- gin and enables them to gain benefit. In the United States, there is a discussion to set up a new framework for digital I&C. We contribute as a vendor to this process, and hopefully the framework that’s going to come out will enable digital I&C to be cost competitive in the market for nuclear power plants. Today we provide digital I&C all over the world and for different reactor types, including those for which we are not the Original Equipment Manu- facturer (OEM). Of course, we still offer both digital and analog systems, but if a customer goes for state-of-the-art digital systems, that’s what we prefer to provide. With the recent acquisition and integration of Schneider Electric’s nuclear instrumentation and control business, we canoffer trulyaddedvalue toour customers with a global technical expertise on I&C solutions. This acquisition adds the nuclear-qualified version of Tricon and the SPEC 200 platform to Framatome’s nuclear safety I&C portfolio, which includes the TELEPERM XS digital platform. Digitalization is a major priority for the company. 3. Does digitalization also include big data management? When talking about big data, what we have in mind is the collection of all operational information in order to be able to analyze the status of the plant automatically, to anticipate any required maintenance, and therefore, to shift from a maintenance activity to preventive maintenance. For us, that’s a key element of our offering that we need to work on with the operators. It’s not something that we can do all by ourselves, but we propose this to the operators and have already started to implement such systems. I think it’s a part of the nuclear industry’s future, and we are going to enlarge our offer regarding such solutions. 4. Do you plan to focus on safety related systems of the plant as well? Today our focus is probably a lot more on the operational aspects of the plant. However, digital I&C provides a better understanding of the plant’s situation, the core parameters and things like that. Such input enables us to provide more margins, for example, for the operators, and therefore, gives them more flexibility in their operations, to allow them, in turn, to run their plants more efficiently. But that’s through that digital acquisition of the core parameters and the status of the plant that you can gain that additional margin for safe operations. 5. Innovation is key in the nuclear sector, and the market is particularly competitive. What are the different research efforts in place to develop new material and new technology for the reactors of tomorrow? We all are drivers / active actors in the change of reactor generation, what we call Gen 3 plus, which the EPR reactor is for example. The priority is to take the industrial lessons and turn it into a fully industrial product. You can make a lot of design efforts, but the key is to turn it into industrial, predictable project timing, and that’s really where we put in a lot of efforts. We also work on Gen 4 reactors and we have some initiatives, for example, on small modular reactors, 20 NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, May-June 2018