The USA Chemistry functional area has had a busy start to the year. Similar to the other functional areas, Chemistry implemented its first Functional Area Scorecard (FAS). The CFAM group benchmarked other fleets to determine how to best monitor fleet performance, and incorporated those learnings into the FAS.

The Chemistry Peer Team is also busy addressing plant issues that impact performance relative to the industry’s (INPO) Chemistry Effectiveness Index (CEI). For example, we found that a number of the PWRs in the USA group have challenges maintaining feedwater iron levels within desired ranges – particularly during plant startups. In an effort to better understand cause, and more importantly potential corrective actions, Prairie Island is hosting a specific assessment on this issue in July. Other USA plants such as DC Cook and South Texas Project and industry experts external to the USA group are joining the team too. This will provide a great opportunity to address a common issue with several of our USA stations. Thank you Prairie Island for hosting this effort!

The Chemistry Peer Team will have its first 2016 face-to-face meeting on June 30, following INPO’s annual two-day Chemistry Managers Workshop in Atlanta. Combining the meeting with the annual INPO meeting reduces travel costs for the group. We will share lessons learned from recent INPO/WANO evaluations at two of our sites in April (we have four other USA sites being evaluated yet this year). We can learn from the technical and leadership aspects of the AFIs, as well as how to better interface with our evaluators. We also will talk about leadership in terms of improving human performance as has been very well demonstrated in some of our stations and also how leadership can impact chemistry performance through improved advocacy. We can all learn a lot from each other, and that is what we are leveraging as quickly and effectively as we can.