EnergyBiz - January/February 2008 - (Page 18) » FInanCIaL FRont running Smarter upgRADing nucleAR opeRAtions By RichARD schlesingeR Ta lK a bouT a Tur na rou nd. The av er age capacity factor of nuclear plants around 1990 was a dismal 70 percent, according to statistics collected by the Nuclear Energy Institute. When the 1992 energy act ushered in the era of deregulation, the only future for nuclear that Wall Street and the industry could see was decommissioning and sunken costs. Today, the average for all 104 plants is about 90 percent, with some plants running closer to 95 percent. Adrian Heymer, NEI’s senior director for new plant development, points to similarly impressive improvements in unplanned outages and productivity, with the number of workers-per-megawatt falling from 1.2 at the end of the 1980s to around 0.7 today. Even in a highly competitive energy environment, nuclear is, at least on an operational basis, not only price competitive but in some instances the cheapest of all available alternatives. In fact, operating costs per kilowatt-hour in 2006 were 1.68 cents for nuclear versus 2.2 cents for coal, according to NEI. The real agent of change has been structural. Many nuclear operators have put in place a management structure with specific lines of responsibility, clearly articulated goals, a standardization of best practices, and a commitment to continuous improvement. Add the economies of scale and deep pool of skilled and experienced personnel that come from sheer size, and you have the formula for success that’s transformed even poorly performing plants into profitable sites. “The first thing we did when we took over operations for PSEG’s nuclear sites was to NewsFlash bring in plant vice presidents and move accountability indonesia’s power ThirsT from the central office to the line, where it belongs,” says Indonesia needs 35,000 megawatts of electricity William Levis, president and generation that will cost COO of PSEG Power. Levis about $39 billion to was Exelon’s vice president build. of Mid-Atlantic operations The generation is when the company took over needed as part of a government effort to operation of PSEG’s nuclear provide electricity to plants as part of a merger deal all citizens by 2020, that was ultimately quashed according to Xinhua by the state of New Jersey. He News Agency. Currently, about 44 percent of the employed the management 220 million people in the model that Exelon has used Asian country receive no at all of its other plants, part of electricity. which consists of a manageThe state electricity ment structure with detailed firm next year will complete construction responsibility for achieving clear of coal-fired plants that fleetwide benchmarks. will generate 10,000 Similarly, the first thing megawatts. Currently, Entergy does when taking Indonesia generates 29,000 megawatts. over a plant is to do a thorough assessment of how the plant is operating, where its strengths are and where its weaknesses are. “We do an assessment of the material condition of the plant right up front,” says former Entergy president Don Hintz, currently president of the American Nuclear Society. “Then we do an assessment of the management. Generally a plant will have very skilled people, but there may be a piece missing. Even if management is reasonably strong, we put some people in senior positions who are familiar with Entergy’s way of doing business, its practices and its people, so it’s easier to share information.” The third step, according to Hintz, is to look at the regulatory situation. If the plant is under regulatory scrutiny, it’s vital to draw up a plan the NRC can monitor. “If you don’t jump right in,” warns Hintz, “that plant could easily go into a regulatory shutdown, and once that happens, regardless of how talented your people may be, the plant will be shut down for a year or two, and that’s going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.” Ongoing operations within the fleets are driven by a series of highly detailed metrics for virtually every process and operation, developed both within the fleets and by the industry as a whole, as a cooperative effort coordinated largely by the Institute of Nuclear Plant Operators and by NEI. According to Amir Shahkarami, Exelon Nuclear’s senior vice president of engineering and technical services, “We know exactly how every unit in the world is performing. We select plants that are similar to ours in size and operational particulars and we benchmark some critical area. Every year we identify some gaps we see in our plants and we consciously take action to close those gaps. Internally, once we find a problem at one plant, we fix it there and throughout the fleet. It could be a material condition, equipment reliability or human performance or operational challenges, but once you identify it, you leverage that knowledge and take care of it throughout your fleet.” Exelon, for instance, piloted a preventive maintenance program at one of its plants to address switchyard problems. The program dramatically decreased switchyard disturbances at the plant, so Exelon deployed the program fleetwide. As a result, grid disturbances, which had averaged one or two per plant per year, fell to zero for the entire fleet in 2006. Similarly, when Exelon noticed a big improvement in maintaining reactor water chemistry at one of its plants after installation of a full filtration system, that system was installed at other plants, with similar results. The standardization of practices and procedures allows the fleets to leverage their workforce as smaller operators cannot. Both Entergy and Exelon share resources during refueling outages. “You can go out and hire lots of craft labor,” Hintz says, “but some of these people will never have been in a nuclear plant before. Our people are familiar with working in a radiological environment and they’re familiar with our procedures.” Consolidation also eliminates personnel duplication; crews can be moved from one unit to another and perform basically the same maintenance or modifications. As NEI’s Heymer points out, you can standardize equipment and processes, so “a guy who’s been on a learning curve at the first plant, by the time he gets to the third, he knows exactly what needs to be done and how to do it.” Still, refueling outages remain complex and demanding and require extensive planning. Exelon’s Amir Shahkarami cites both careful planning and the ability to call on resources from around the fleet as factors that have led to a dramatic 18 E n E rgyB i z January/February 2008 http://www.energycentral.com
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