Activities performed during Refueling and Maintenance Outages support the safe and reliable operations of nuclear facilities.

Four Utilities Service Alliance plants planned to perform refueling and maintenance tasks.

DC Cook Nuclear Plant Unit 1 and Susquehanna Unit 1 Nuclear Plant recently connected to the grid, and Salem and Comanche Peak are currently performing their outage.

Since January, Dick Ehr, corporate functional area manager for outages, has been involved in supporting the Utilities Service Alliance fleet with outage preparations.

Even though outage preparations begin long before an outage commences Ehr and the Outage Excellence Team worked to implement process improvements to support the USA fleet

“The biggest change involved receiving a daily outage update,” Ehr said. “This process involves capturing lessons learned to improve outage performance.”

Ehr will take the lessons learned from the spring outage and incorporate the lessons learned into future outages. He will also work with the Outage Excellence Team to review the major projects that are similar at other stations for future outage support collaboration and project readiness.

In addition to refueling the reactor and performing regular maintenance and testing work, workers at Cook Unit 1 and Susquehanna Unit 1completed several large component replacements. Below are a few highlights from the work completed.

Cook Unit 1

Cook Unit 1 workers replaced two 60-ton feedwater heaters that pre-heat water before it enters the steam generators. A 40-ton safety-related heat exchanger also was replaced. Other modifications enhanced the reliability of plant emergency electrical systems and decreased the wear on steam generator tubes. During the 36 day period, the Cook team completed more than 13,500 maintenance, inspection and equipment modification job activities totaling almost 300,000 work-hours.

Susquehanna Unit 1

The Susquehanna team replaced three feedwater heaters during the outage. A major evolution – including work from heights – it required the removal of Turbine Building Wall sections approximately three stories above ground. An elevated platform which raised and lowered was used to take old feedwater heaters to the ground, and bring the new ones back up. As the old feedwater heaters were prepared for removal, the station learned the adhesive used to affix insulation to the old feedwater heaters more than 30 years ago contained a small amount of asbestos. Susquehanna responded quickly by stopping work, removing employees from the work area, restricting access and bringing an Industrial Hygienist on-site to take air quality samples in search of asbestos. Tenting was installed around the final old feedwater heater and insulation was stripped. Air sam-ples—263 of them—determined no worker was ever exposed to unsafe levels of asbestos.