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Shutdown Safety, a Cornerstone at
Exelon
By Glen Earl Chick, Exelon Nuclear.
1. What is Exelon’s Corporate and Plant
Management strategy to organize and
supervise plant shutdown safety during a
refueling outage?
In addition to industrial safety and
radiological safety, shutdown safety is
a cornerstone at Exelon for planning
and executing a successful refueling
outage. The key strategies are to maintain
sufficient defense-in-depth of systems
important to maintain a plant’s shutdown
safety.
Planning for a refueling outage begins
a minimum of 18 months in advance and
includes a plan and schedule for which
shutdown safety systems, power supplies
and support systems will remain operable
throughout the outage. The main controls
used to ensure shutdown safety is detailed
preparation and review of the outage
schedule by Operations, Maintenance and
key stakeholders to make sure work is not
performed on systems needed to maintain
shutdown safety. An independent team,
called the Shutdown Safety Review
Board reviews the outage schedule,
contingencies and protected equipment
plans prior to the outage. This certifies
the outage schedule readiness to maintain
shutdown safety.
The Operations department maintains
overall responsibility to verify adequate
system availability is maintained through
configuration control and system statuses.
This includes approval prior to removing
systems from service for maintenance
or testing by on-shift Operation’s
supervision. The approval must include
a review of the shutdown risk profile with
the system removed from service and
validate the assumptions in the schedule
still maintain adequate shutdown
safety. Systems that can be worked per
the schedule are taken out of service,
maintenance and testing performed and
returned to service.
Responses to questions by Newal
Agnihotri, Editor; Nuclear Plant
Journal.
Glen Earl Chick
Glen Earl is the Vice President of
Outage Planning and Services at Exelon
Nuclear. He leads a service organization
that provides turnkey operation of all
fuel fl oor and under-vessel activities,
turbine and generator fl oor activities
INPO issued Significant Operating
Experience Report (SOER) 09-1 in the
fall of 2009. This document provided
guidance of industry best practices on
shutdown safety during a refueling outage.
Exelon reviewed these recommendations
and have enhanced our processes with the
following improvements:
• Exelon has implemented an
Operation’s procedure at all sites on
best practices to protect equipment
needed for shutdown safety. This
includes signage, physical barriers
and control processes to make sure
systems counted on to maintain
shutdown safety are not affected.
The status of protected equipment is
briefed at every outage meeting with
Operations, Outage Control Center
(OCC) and Work Group briefings.
This is important since there is a
significant amount of work being
performed by site personnel and
contractors.
• One of the leading industry issues
on shutdown safety performance is
loss of power caused by issues with
configuration control and switchyard
work activities. Control of utility
for station online and outage execution,
NDE support for station on-line and
outage needs and supports the Dry Cask
Fuel Storage needs for the stations. He
also oversees outage preparedness and
execution across the Exelon nuclear
fl eet of 17 reactors at 10 stations and
provides Alliance Partner Oversight
and Contract Management for Exelon’s
major Alliance Partners.
Glen Earl has over 30 years of
experience in the nuclear industry. He
joined Exelon in 2002. Prior to assuming
his current position, as Vice President,
Outage Planning and Services in April
2007, he was the Vice President, Project
Management.
Glen Earl has a Senior Reactor
Operator Certifi cation.
and contractor work in and around
the switchyard is controlled to make
sure the proper oversight is provided
on this work. This is accomplished
through interface agreements
between the site and the transmission
provider where roles, responsibilities
and controls are specified. Controls
similar to protected equipment
processes above now extend into the
switchyard boundary.
• Consistency in site and outside
contractor training. Shutdown
safety is now incorporated into
Operations training in preparation
for the refueling outages, through
crew simulation and detailed
schedule reviews. In addition, all
site and outside contractors are
given training to be able to identify
protected equipment signage and
understand the importance of why
this equipment is protected and
needed for the outage.
2. Probabilistic Risk Assessment has
sometimes shown that the possibility of
core melt is higher during the refueling
26 www.NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, May-June 2010