May-June 2018 NPJ

48 NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, May-June 2018 U.S.-based Westinghouse Outage Control Center during an Outage Season. 3. What is INPO's contribution to the outage management effort? We use the INPO database for operating experience and lessons learned. We also use an extensive database internal to Westinghouse. We share our lessons learned with our customers, the utility partners we have, because they have their own lessons learned databases as well. During post-outage reviews with our partners, we try to make sure everything is captured in one or both of the systems. When we are planning upcoming work, this helps us make sure we can utilize the operating experience and lessons learned to move forward with improvements and training as needed. 4. Do you service only plants with Westinghouse reactors, or you service plants even with other vendors’ reactors? In addition to the Westinghouse designs, we service other designs including the Combustion Engineering design, and General Electric’s boiling water reactor design. All over the world, we work on all different types of reactors and plant designs. 5. What is Westinghouse’s commitment to implement Nuclear Energy Institute’s Efficiency Bulletins? We are tied in very closely with industry initiatives to improve efficiency and to save cost. We have representatives who work with NEI directly on these efficiency bulletins. We are already supporting NEI Efficiency Bulletin: 16- 26b, “Standardization of In-processing Training,” as well as some of the other initial ones. We’ve been working with all our utility partners to be able to maximize participation. As the bulletins are published, we analyze them and look at how we can best implement them to help the industry as a whole. 6. How does Westinghouse minimize cost of maintenance in an outage? Our goal is to be as efficient as possible through minimizing resources, time on site, and crew dose exposure for any given service. We’re always developing or enhancing technology to achieve these goals. For example, we’ve done a lot to improve steam generator inspections and maintenance. For maintenance, we’ve applied an advanced scale conditioning agent (ASCA) to clean secondary side corrosive deposits and couple that with our mobile reverse osmosis system. This system reduces the volume of ASCA process and rinse waste by up to 70 to 90 percent, decreasing the amount of waste that must be shipped from the site.We’ve also decreased sludge lancing times by 25 percent with our custom-designed Stellar® tube cleaning nozzles. For inspections, we developed the Zephyr® Advanced Acquisition System to greatly improve the efficiency of eddy current inspections of the tubes. It’s really comprised of several components including advanced robotics, a sealed inspection probe delivery system and the Zephyr probe itself. These are all brought together with advanced software. It extends the probe life, which reduces the amount of probe changes we have to do, and reduces time, dose and waste. We’ve also improved data acquisition accuracy with our TITAN™ Auto History Compare software. All of these steam generator-related technologies and software improvements are meant to optimize resources and create efficiencies. We havemany other technologies that are deployed during outages that reduce time and dose. We have an underwater scrubber we call U-DEC™. We can decontaminate underwater surfaces, such as the reactor cavity, so when we drain it to conduct inspections or maintenance, the dose our personnel are exposed to is far less, and they are able to do their jobs more efficiently. We also deploy a lot of remote cameras that allow us to avoid having somebody go into higher dose areas with a mirror and a camera. We’re now able to use cameras on extended stick poles to take photos of o-rings, of contaminated surfaces, etc., from afar. This practice reduces the dose for our personnel, and saves time. Those are some of the technologies we’re developing and implementing during outages, to be able to help perform inspections more efficiently and safely. That’s a main focus of our technology development, working to find ways that we can be safer and more efficient. We also recently developed the LiveCAN™ system. Essentially, it’s a digital audiovisual system. With it, we have live video feeds from the containment areas, steam generator platforms, refuel floor and rotating equipment cubicles. It allows us to set up cameras in these areas and have audio communication via headsets to our crews. They’re able to talk to the headquarter posts, such as trailers that we have set up outside containment where we command and control the outage. Optimizing Outage... ( Continued from page 47)