May-June 2018 NPJ

46 NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, May-June 2018 Optimizing Outage Service Delivery By Michael Pribish, Westinghouse Electric Company. Michael Pribish Mike Pribish directs Westinghouse Electric Company U.S. Field Service Operations where he has overall responsibility for the planning, preparation, resourcing, implementation and field execution of services for outages, including refueling; steam generators; rotating equipment; instrumentation and control; crane equipment and other technologies. Mr. Pribish started working at Westinghouse 12 years ago as a senior engineer in Fuel Service and Reactor Technology. Working in positions of increasing responsibility, he became project manager and principal engineer in Reactor Services before entering management roles in Resources, Equipment and Training and U.S. PWR Operations. Mr. Pribish served in the United States Army, from which he retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. Mr. Pribish earned his Master of Business Administration degree from Park University, and his Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. A telephone interview on May 10, 2018 by Newal Agnihotri, Editor of Nuclear Plant Journal. Continuous Improvement 1. Please describe how you evaluate outages to ensure safety, quality of work and economy going forward? We evaluate our outages before, during and after execution. Our outage seasons are very cyclical. In the U.S. this pattern consists of spring and fall outage seasons. We evaluate our outage performance during the non-outage summer and winter seasons. This is when we apply our Westinghouse delivery model to look back at the performance between us and our utility partners, as well as forward to plan the next outage season, incorporating what we learned in the prior outage seasons. In this way, we create a continuous cycle to improve outage execution. This means that twice a year we examine our performance and go through a rigorous non-outage preparation time period that begins when we return from the outage season. For example, right now we’re finishing up the spring season for the U.S.-based outages. We start by examining lessons learned entries that are input by our field teams into our Corrective Action Program (CAP) system. For my areas of responsibility, this includes lessons learned in primarily all of the standard outage services such as refueling, fuel handling equipment, steam generator, rotating equipment, and instrumentation and control (I&C) activities. This also includes areas of my peers’ responsibility, which is primarily plant modification work for our utility customers. We get our teams together and examine what went well for us and our partners and which areas may need improvement. Part of this process is data mining in our CAP system, which is similar to utilities’ Condition Reporting (CR) system. We input to our CAP system important information about what happened during our work, best practices and issues that we encountered. We do this for any service in any utility where we perform outage work. The process begins with a basic look at the product services: our steam generators, our refueling, and so on by service area. Those reviews roll up to the next level, which is the field service level for Westinghouse. At this level we look across our services and across all outages and complete an experience analysis forum. This helps us take a deeper dive, or closer look, at all the lessons learned and the best practices from the previous season. This process also helps us to reexamine our training qualification program to make sure we’re focusing on areas that need attention, sowe can provide the best services for all of our customers and utilities. Additionally, we evaluate whether there are improvements we can make to our equipment to make it safer, to reduce human errors and to improve efficiency. We review work of our personnel and appraise our equipment during this process. We examine all of that data, all the lessons learned and best practices, with a strong focus on hazard and risk recognition. This process allows us to know if we need to retrain personnel or provide them better tools to apply to the next outage season. These would be tools that facilitate better understanding, during their pre-job briefs, of what the risks are inherent to upcoming activities they are about to undertake. The risk recognition process I’ve described is not limited only to Westinghouse. Outage performance is a team effort and we work to combine our efforts with the utilities’ efforts. We invite our customers to attend deep dive lessons learned, and some of the analysis forums and risk reviews. This is one of the ways we improve hazard and risk recognition. We also apply this data to planning for the next outage season. From the end of the previous season and before our teams go back out to work the next outage season, we refocus them with hazard recognition training and provide any additional qualifications they need. We also conduct risk reviews by service area for the upcoming outage season to target specific risks. For example, if one of our customers has significant additional emergent work scope they’re going to