Nuclear Plant Journal Outage Management ... - Digital Versions

Benchmarking Against U.S.
Standards
By Magnox North, United Kingdom.
1. Which of Magnox North’s plants has
minimum refueling outage period? Please
describe about Magnox North’s strategies
which have resulted in this minimal
refueling outage accomplishments.
The Magnox North has 2 Operational
Nuclear Power Plants, Wylfa in North
Wales and Oldbury in the south west of
England. Both of our operational power
plants are first generation twin unit Gas
Cooled Reactors (Magnox Reactors),
which have an on-load refueling capability,
therefore refueling outages are not
required.
The Reactor Pressure Vessels at each
of our sites do require “statutory” biennial
inspection and maintenance, along
with plant systems that can not be released
during normal operations. In order
to facilitate this work Statutory outages
occur on each reactor every 2 years.
Oldbury Power Station is the oldest
operational Nuclear Power Plant in the
world and Wylfa is the second oldest.
Although both sites are of the Magnox
Design they were built during a period of
fast paced engineering change and other
than the basic design elements, the sites
are dissimilar. Outage durations at both
sites are determined by a variety of plant
aging related problems.
The Magnox North employs a
strategy of Incentivization of the M&O
contract through increasing fee associated
with generation, which leads to pressure
to reduce Outage durations.
Magnox North Sites the current
M&O contractor (Magnox North Sites)
has employed a number of strategies to
reduce Outage durations, comprising:-
Responses to questions by Newal
Agnihotri, Editor of Nuclear Plant
Journal.
Magnox North is owned by
EnergySolutions, Inc. Magnox reactors
fuel on-load so outages are for
maintenance purposes only.
• Benchmarking of the Outage processes
against US standards.
The Magnox sites reviewed the
US model for outage management
between 2002 and 2005 to identify
best practices that could reduce Outage
durations across the Magnox
fleet. Changes brought about through
this process included:-
1. The use of project management
techniques.
2. Outage area Project leads
were appointed to provide a
focus for each plant area.
3. Development of dedicated
plant area teams.
4. The use of a common Out-
Oldbury Reactor and Pylon
age standard,
5. the use of critical path analysis.
• Greater utilization of Operational
Event Feedback (OEF) linked to the
Outage program.
The Outage teams use the OEF
process to capture any non conformance
with the Outage plan or any loss or event.
More details in response to question 2
below.
• Magnox cross site learning
The 2 operational sites work
closely to share learning and best practice.
The Outage managers from each site are
both involved in all post outages reviews.
2. How is “lessons learned” from
one refueling outage transferred to
implementation of “refueling outage” of
the same plant or another Magnox North
plant?
The Outage teams use the site OEF
process to capture any non conformance
with the Outage plan or any loss or event.
All items/learning captured are then
reviewed and links to the OEF is created
to the Outage program such that learning
can be presented to Outage teams “just in
time” at the next outage. This process was
observed by WANO to be a best practice.
A program of reviews is completed
with each of the Outage Project leads with
their area team to identify lessons learnt.
The review process is then used to feed
into the next outages gate review process
and project leads provide a presentation
to the site lead team on lessons learnt and
how these will be addressed in the next
outage.
3. How does Magnox North ensure
continued availability of experienced
staff at its different nuclear power plants
during outage? How is the attrition of
staff made up by new personnel?
It is the M&O contractors responsibility
to manage the availability of resources
and experienced staff.
The M&O contractor (Magnox North
Sites) arrangements are encapsulating
under the UK Nuclear Site license
requirements to manage changes to
resources and management of Core
Competence.
With the sites now at the end of their
operational lives (both sites have less than
4 years of operational service left) they
have in place transition plans to manage
the resources through to the end of life.
These plans include:-
• Retentions of some specific skilled
employees with specialist skilled
staff
• Agreements with some OEM’s to
ensure their skills are retained
(Continued on page 30)
Nuclear Plant Journal, May-June 2009 www.nuclearplantjournal.com 29