May-June 2019 NPJ

Nuclear Plant Journal, May-June 2019 NuclearPlantJournal.com 47 OUTAGE MANAGEMENT FLOOR PROTECTION & EQUIPMENT COVERS NO DELAYS IN OUTAGES OUTDOOR TRANSPORTATION ONSITE STORAGE NFPA 701 CERTIFIED FME PROTECTION STOCK ROLLS READILY AVAIL griffolyn.com 1.800.231.6074 ABLE and reinforced safety over production by having site-wide 100- and 300-hour stand-downs to focus on our safety performance and prioritize keeping safety first through the balance of the outage. After the outage, we continue the same behaviors; our focus on safety doesn’t change because the breaker is closed. Mike Carpenter: The utility sets up the outage based on their license and their technical specifications, outlining the requirements for outage timing and what plant conditions need to be met to do certain work. Safety of industrial, nuclear and radiological activities is the priority for our teams, every day and every shift. We mitigate the risk inherent to our work by training and qualifying our teams and having a rigorous pre-job briefing process. We incorporate risk reviews as early as possible during planning and include options for elimination of the hazards. We also plan for mitigation, but for our teams, it’s always preferable to eliminate the hazard. 14. Is the Outage Control Center equipped to take care of any emergent issues? Mike Carpenter: Yes, there are several purposes for having an outage control center; one is to monitor and coach ongoing work. The second is to be there 24/7, year-round, to respond to emergent issues regardless of the cause. 15. What efforts are put in place to minimize the cost and optimize the shutdown during an outage? Demitrius Davis: It starts with planning the work carefully, then sticking to the plan to hit our scope targets as a team. The next step is to look for smarter ways to streamline, becoming more efficient and cost effective by leveraging innovation, smarter resource loading and other factors. Mike Carpenter: For Framatome, the cost associated with our reactor vessel work and moving fuel is largely in our team.We manage this cost by making sure we have the right people, with the proper level of training, available when they’re needed. If we see that we’re coming up to a period in the outage when there may be something that’s preventing us from working, we’ll work with the utility to mitigate that cost in the short term. Longer term, we work closely to plan and coordinate with the utility because managing cost depends on planning the outage well and making sure we get the right people there at the right time. 16. How do you handle work which was not in the predefined scope? Mike Carpenter: It depends on what it is and whether it’s within our wheelhouse or not. We have the ability to work with others to fix problems beyond our core scope. For instance, if there’s a problem with a piece of refueling equipment, we have the capabilities to either repair the component or provide the guidance on how to repair it on the spot. 17. It is a highly skilled job to do plant refueling. How do you get them educated? Do you send them to a community college which has a special program for Framatome and then you train them in- house? Mike Carpenter: We work closely with the community college in Lynchburg, Virginia. We have a two-year program that features a flexible education schedule that allows students to work during outage season and take courses during other parts of the year. We also work to develop candidates from other industries who have strong mechanical or electromechanical skills and are several years into their careers. Using our Technical Training Center, we are able to help these types of candidates develop the nuclear-specific skills that they need to be a part of the team. Most of our senior people and leadership have either worked in the industry for utilities, at other companies or have grown up through the ranks at Framatome. We work with all levels and we bring people in at all levels depending on our needs. Contact: Framatome Media Relations, telephone: (434) 856-6560, email: media. relations@framatome.com. Coordinating and... ( Continued from page 24)