One of the Utilities Service Alliance (USA) initiatives providing value to member stations across the country is the Personnel Sharing Agreement. Through this agreement, USA sites are able to supplement their staff during peak work periods such as outages, with experienced, high-performing staff from other sites.
The arrangement is beneficial on a variety of fronts, including using experienced nuclear staff which customarily reduces costs associated with training and ‘onboarding.’ Perhaps more importantly, though, are the mutual benefits gained between sites – including the sharing and learning that stems from new or different perspectives.
Recently, PPL Susquehanna first-line supervisor Robert ‘Buck’ McHenry took part in the USA Personnel Sharing Program. This experience was somewhat of a breakthrough for PPL Susquehanna as it was the first share actually initiated by and coordinated through the USA Personnel Sharing Team and program.
“Many of our team members have been to other sites for benchmarking or other purposes, and will certainly identify with that notion,” said PPL Susquehanna’s Susan Downs, one of two team members who support the station and USA’s program. “When the idea was proposed, Buck enthusiastically accepted the opportunity to work at DC Cook during their fall 2014 refueling outage.”
Preparation activities were taken prior to Buck travelling to Michigan – and the DC Cook USA Personnel Sharing Team representative and others were ready to welcome their visiting staff allowing them to connect with a team of peers and become acclimated and productive in short order.
What DC Cook got out of the bargain: When you’re borrowing personnel from another nuclear station, there is a basic expectation that a site would only send a high-caliber, high-quality candidate as their representative. One of DC Cook’s outage leads Craig Allee said this about Buck: “His knowledge and uncompromising high standards allowed us to assign him duties related to supervising main condenser cleaning, CCW heat exchanger re-tubing, feed pump lube oil cooler tube bundle replacement, and various heat exchange tube plugging evolutions. Buck’s supervisory skills and questioning attitude allowed us to focus our attention in other areas to set the stage for the shortest refueling outage in U-1 history. Thanks for allowing him to become a part of our organization during our refueling outage.”
What PPL Susquehanna got out of the bargain: Certainly the experience was beneficial for Buck’s professional development, but Buck also came back with a sense of how Susquehanna can ratchet-up performance in a few key areas, and he’ll be sharing those learnings in a formal report.
“I was one of several foremen from other plants who went to work with DC Cook for their outage,” said Buck. “I was completely impressed with the way all of us were brought together as a team even before the work began. The work was well-coordinated and it was a pleasure to be part of helping them achieve the shortest outage on record.”
“Susquehanna would like to participate in more of this type of personnel sharing, both on the loaning and borrowing sides. It’s not a given that other sites would have needs that fit with our qualifications and availability,” said USA Board Chair and PPL Susquehanna Chief Nuclear Officer Tim Rausch. “As with every station, it’s not easy to determine which staff members would be able to go “on the road” to another site for a few weeks. However, USA is interested in finding opportunities that are carefully considered and implemented where the benefits outweigh the inconvenience.”
“It is our intent that communicating about Buck’s recent experience will inspire others at Susquehanna to consider examining a plan for their own group’s participation in the program.” said Downs.
Each summer the member sites develop a baseline personnel sharing request database for the following year, then throughout the year make refinements as conditions and needs change.