NextEra Sets Record With 700-MW Power Uprate

NEI’s Top Industry Practice Awards recognize innovation in the nuclear energy industry. Presented at NEI’s annual conference, the awards honor accomplishments that help the industry improve safety, streamline processes and increase efficiency.

In a special series of articles this week, our publication Nuclear Energy Overview highlights the challenges and successes of five winners.

This year’s Westinghouse Combustion Engineering Award went to a gargantuan project—NextEra Energy completed the largest extended power uprate project in history, adding more than 700 megawatts of additional generating capacity across four reactors in Florida and two in Wisconsin.

With more than 30 million hours worked to complete the uprate, NextEra’s project called on a workforce of thousands, an economic boon to the communities that host the facilities.

Terry Jones, vice president of nuclear power uprates, stressed the importance of instilling in the workers the nuclear energy industry’s safety culture.

“They understand how we work, how we’re just absolutely fanatical when it comes to safety,” Jones said.

Much of the workforce was new to the nuclear industry, but extensive training, on-site coaching and daily feedback ensured the work was performed safely and efficiently.


A major workforce challenge was coordinating the logistics of so many workers.

“On any given day, you’re dealing with a workforce that’s in excess of 3,000, in addition to your normal plant staff,” Jones said. “You had to set up a traffic control just to be able to get the workforce to and from the sites in a safe manner.”

The benefits of an extensive workforce outweighed the challenges, however.

“We provided a tremendous amount of employment and economic benefit to the region. We were employing more than 3,500 workers on any given day on average, and about 50 percent of that workforce was Floridian,” Jones said.

He added that NextEra will see many long-term benefits from the uprates.

“You’ve got a more modern plant that will result in improved reliability. You’ve got fuel cost savings for the customer. You’ve got greater fuel diversification. You’re reducing CO2 emissions,” Jones said.

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Duke Examines 6,500 Oconee Reactor Parts in One Refueling Outage

NEI’s Top Industry Practice Awards recognize innovation in the nuclear energy industry. Presented at NEI’s annual conference, the awards honor accomplishments that help the industry improve safety, streamline processes and increase efficiency.

In a special series of articles this week, our publication Nuclear Energy Overview highlights the challenges and successes of five winners.

Rachel Doss’ team at Duke Energy’s Oconee nuclear energy facility in South Carolina earned the 2013 AREVA Vendor Award, but its project—developing and implementing guidelines for inspecting and evaluating pressurized water reactor internals—was many years in the making.

Rather than scheduling reactor internal inspections over multiple refueling outages, Duke’s winning team performed one of the industry’s largest-ever reactor vessel inspections, examining more than 6,500 reactor components during one outage at the Oconee 1 reactor.

Its scope required planning with vendors, performing numerous risk assessments and developing contingency plans.

“The engineering work contract was in place three years in advance of the project. The inspection service to get all of the tooling developed, that was in place two and a half years in advance. We started our biweekly calls one and a half to two years in advance of the inspections,” said Doss, a fleet programs engineer with Duke Energy.

“Because we started planning so far in advance, we were able to come up with a list of unknowns prior to the outage,” Doss said. The team was then able to gather reactor vessel measurements and develop new tools that allowed inspections to be performed remotely and in parallel with other work, helping the company avoid the high costs of completing the work over the course of multiple outages.

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Shift in Clinton Plant Refueling Cycle Increases Efficiency

NEI’s Top Industry Practice Awards recognize innovation in the nuclear energy industry. Presented at NEI’s annual conference, the awards honor accomplishments that help the industry improve safety, streamline processes and increase efficiency.

In a special series of articles this week, our publication Nuclear Energy Overview highlights the challenges and successes of five winners.

Eight-time TIP Award winner Jim Tusar is no stranger to ambitious projects. His most recent, which earned this year’s GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy Award, is no exception.

The industry standard is to schedule refueling and maintenance outages once every 18 months or two years, but Tusar and his team at Exelon Nuclear pioneered an annual outage schedule at the Clinton Power Station in Illinois.

“The idea came from acknowledging the value of [the facility] was decreasing due to the fact we had such high fuel costs, and at the same time power prices were decreasing,” said Tusar, Exelon Nuclear’s manager of nuclear fuels. “We knew that we had to do something to improve the asset value of Clinton, and the main thing to attack would be the fuel, because we can’t control the electricity prices.”

More than 40 percent of the reactor’s fuel needed to be replaced every two years.

“It’s not efficient. You’re not utilizing fuel well in that scenario,” Tusar said.

The Exelon team conducted studies with their fuel vendor, Global Nuclear Fuel, and found that an annual outage cycle would cut costs significantly.

The new schedule will alternate the typical refueling and maintenance outage with a short (13-day) outage dedicated to refueling only. The refuel-only outage is achievable because of a new core design strategy that minimizes the number of fuel moves, leaving some fuel assemblies in the same location from one cycle to the next.

The team also needed to determine the best time of year to schedule the annual outage.
Exelon owns and operates 16 other reactors, so “we don’t want to overlap with any other outages. It’s a resource concern,” Tusar said. Nor did the company want to schedule an outage for summer, when power demands are highest and replacement power is costly.

The path to an annual fuel cycle is still unfolding. Clinton will begin a transitional 18-month fuel cycle this October, which will lead to a May 2015 start date for the first annual outage cycle.

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Guest Post: The Callaway Coastdown

Tom Kauffman

The following is a guest post written by NEI's Tom Kauffman. Though Tom now works in NEI's media relations shop, he spent 23 years working at Three Mile Island, seven of those as a licensed reactor operator. 

Ameren's Callaway Energy Center in Missouri is in a "coastdown." No, it's not rolling to a stop like a skateboard that's missing its rider, it's actually running low on fuel - exactly as planned.

Nuclear plant operators shut down their units to refuel the reactor (aka refueling outage) and do a lot of maintenance work every sixteen to twenty-four months depending on the unit's operating cycle. The Callaway reactor is on a year and-a-half operating cycle.

The uranium fuel in about a third of the fuel assemblies in the nuclear reactor has been used so those fuel assemblies will be removed for storage. The fuel assemblies have been in the reactor for a few cycles of operation and are now located toward the center of the reactor where the greatest fuel use occurs. Of course the operators don't want any of the valuable uranium to go to waste, so it's important that as much as possible has been used to make electricity. Engineers carefully calculate the fuel loading in the reactor to make sure they have enough for each operating cycle, while minimizing the amount that could be unused.

A refueling outage requires hundreds of contract workers, tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of parts and materials, and a tremendous amount of planning. In order to be cost effective, thousands of work hours must be completed in a very structured timeframe. Refueling outages usually take 30 to 40 days, so it's important they start on time. Delaying or extending an outage can cost millions of dollars a day and effect fuel use.

Callaway Energy Center

Outages are normally performed during the spring or fall when demand for electricity is low. Nuclear facilities safely produce large quantities of continuous electricity that is vital for grid stability especially during the summer and winter when demand is high. Therefore, the outages need to be done in a relatively short time window. That's why the workers follow a carefully orchestrated, 24/7, computer-driven work plan.

If during an operating cycle a plant has to shut down or reduce power for some reason, that event might delay the start of the outage. If it's lengthy shut down, it may require removing some unused uranium in the fuel assemblies. It also complicates the fuel loading calculations and outage planning. Ideally there are no shut downs during the operating cycle. But how many million horsepower machines can operate non-stop at full power for a year-and-a-half?

That brings us back to the Callaway nuclear facility. It looks like this operating cycle, like its last operating cycle, the unit will run "breaker-to-breaker." This means they started the Callaway unit and ran it continuously at or near full power until it is shut down for the refueling outage. That's outstanding, but it gets even better. Precisely as anticipated (because of their extremely accurate fuel loading calculations) several weeks before the scheduled start of the outage the reactor has started to slowly reduce power because the fuel in the center of the reactor can no longer support full power operation. When power reaches about 80 percent they will shut the reactor down and begin the outage right when their team scheduled it to start. The bottom line is, the unit has run very reliably and the fuel use was on target. It doesn't get any better than that.

By the way, in 2012 the nuclear industry's average capacity factor (a measure of reliability) was a bit under 90%. Callaway's 2012 capacity factor was 99.4%.

Thanks to Tom for filling us in on these details. I think it's also important to point out that nuclear outages are a real boon to local economies. Earlier this month, Exelon's Quad Cities Generating Station began its own outage that drew an additional 2,000 workers to Cordova, Illinois. What's the bottom line financially: $2.7 million pumped into the local economy.

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