4 Strategies for Reducing Planned Outage Duration and Cost

By Bill Hickman

Over the last three decades, the nuclear industry has made tremendous progress in reducing the duration of planned outages. It is almost unimaginable to think that in 1990, the average planned outage took more than three months to complete. Today it seems equally unimaginable that average outage durations can be driven even lower than their current time of 35 days. Admittedly, reducing outage time averages poses both a technological and logistical challenge.

However, history is marked with seemingly impossible tasks that were achieved through high levels of innovation and collaboration.

Most were skeptical back in 1962 when President John F. Kennedy floated a bold idea of putting an American on the moon within the decade. Seven years later, the unthinkable was achieved when Astronaut Neil Armstrong made “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

The nuclear industry continues to transform, ensuring viability for consumers by creating new efficiencies through innovation and collaboration.

In the past two years, the Edwin I. Hatch Nuclear Plant, operated by Southern Nuclear, managed to complete work on both of its most recent refueling outages in record time. In Spring 2016, the plant completed work in 25 days and 17 hours. A year later, it improved that record by more than four days – completing work in just 21 days and 2 hours. This was achieved through the combined efforts and total commitment of the entire station.

It is possible for other plants to duplicate this success.

We’ve identified four key strategies that helped them to achieve these impressive results.

It’s Never Too Early to Plan

While some may say that 18 months to two years is an appropriate amount of time to plan for an outage, experience proves a longer lead time is key to improving outcomes and minimizing outage durations.

At Hatch, pre-outage planning extended to almost three years before work began on the two most recent outages. Having this much time before an outage begins gives operators plenty of time to engage all of the key stakeholders, and identify potential trouble spots.

“We have used the advance-planning time to work closely with our alliance contractors to ensure all their workers are fully trained and certified when they arrive on site,” said David Vineyard, Site Vice President for Edwin I. Hatch Nuclear Plant. “This means we can get to work right away.”

Operators like Southern Nuclear also benefit from developing specific milestones during the planning process to track progress.

Even with long lead times, an organization can run out of planning runway without clearly defined goals and objectives.

Establish a Culture of Empowerment

Even with the most thorough and well-organized plan, it’s people that execute the work and must be motivated to execute the plan. Empowering every worker to be a leader and take ownership of every project is critical to achieving success. Workers must feel comfortable making process improvement suggestions to management. Establishing this culture starts at the top with company leaders demonstrating they are truly open hearing from every member of the organization.

“At Southern Nuclear, we have a leadership and teamwork model that is embedded in everything that we do,” says Vineyard. “We want to make sure that everyone in the organization is engaged with their work and understands the important role they play in making a project successful. On any given outage, there are 1,000 or more workers on site. We need them all to be leaders if we’re going to be successful.”

This mentality extends to service providers and partners, too. Selecting the right partners from the start is critical. When operators view those partners as an extension of their team, efficiency improves.

Giving contractors a seat at the table and a stake in delivering better results, drives productivity.

Analyze and Optimize

Understanding and celebrating outage success go hand-in-hand. Reviewing lessons learned and applying to future outages is how the best plants achieve even better results. Southern Nuclear evaluates successes across the entire fleet, so it can apply best practices broadly.

“There’s no silver bullet to driving down outage duration,” says Vineyard. “But when we analyze everything comprehensively, we may be able to shave time off a single activity that impacts our ability to be more efficient with other activities.”

By necessity, the nuclear industry must be collaborative and share best practices. Outside partners bring lessons learned from other job-sites and organizations. Plants operators also should share and benchmark with other independent plants, or fleets to compare best practices and improve overall outage performance.

Dare to Think Differently

Almost all work in the outage planning process, and in all nuclear power generation for that matter, is designed to minimize risk.

However, one of the key tenets of the “Delivering the Nuclear Promise” initiative is innovation. The only way to innovate is for plant operators and their partners to be willing to try new approaches. The key to outage planning is taking smart and calculated steps that won’t derail an outage, or cause an irreversible issue if unsuccessful.

“We recently took a different approach by opting for a new contractor after working with another provider for 20 years,” says Vineyard. “This change could have created a large learning curve and potential speed bumps, but instead the new partner ended up being one of the driving factors that allowed us to achieve our record-breaking outage performance.”

At Southern Nuclear, new technologies are being used like robots for remote inspections, drones for dry well work, and data analytics to assist with planning. These technologies serve as additional tools that complement more traditional approaches, but they may someday become a primary aspect of operations.

The Future

The nuclear industry is boldly moving toward the future. Perhaps one day, we will look back on this time period with the same sense of accomplishment and pride we have about space exploration. Reducing outage durations is just one small step for a single nuclear station, and one giant leap for entire industry.

Bill Hickman is Vice President of Nuclear Operations for Day & Zimmermann