News

The USA Valve Team is comprised of 19 plant sites, including nine USA plants, the four STARS plants, FPL/NextEra Energy’s four plants, North Anna, and PSEG.  Engagement and interaction among the AOV and MOV stakeholders at our member stations remains strong.  Eight USA Jump-Up Calls on emergent valve issues have been conducted so far in 2023, with strong participation and helpful feedback provided during each call.  Utilization of our free valve training classes via the USA Valve Services Agreement remains high, with 18 of our 20 available classes having already been allocated.  The plants which requested our no-rental-fee valve diagnostic systems worked well together to coordinate delivery dates so that all 7 diagnostic systems could be shared among the 3 USA plants that needed the equipment for Spring 2023 outages.  We have continued our robust, well-established information exchange of valve-related benchmarking topics and operating experience, with 46 AOV and 22 MOV items disseminated thus far this year.

On July 17^th, we held our semi-annual “Lessons Learned from Outage Valve Work” online session for the Spring 2023 outages.  The meeting was well-attended, with key challenges and successes being discussed for each plant using the USA Valve Services Agreement.  The industry-wide shortage of valve contract workers continues to be an item of concern, but our plants have worked well with Crane Nuclear to be flexible on pre-outage training, arrival dates, and release dates to minimize the brunt of this manpower shortage for everyone.  To help address this issue in the future, Crane Nuclear has developed the Crane Nuclear Valve Institute which is geared toward recent high school graduates and individuals looking to make a career change into a job where they can make a full-year’s salary by working outages seasonally.

Another interesting topic discussed during the July 17^th lessons learned meeting was the benefits realized by the plants that have taken advantage of Crane Nuclear leading a Kaizen Event at their station.  Kaizen Events, loosely translated from the Japanese phrase to “change for the good,” are a one-week, focused problem-solving approach to enact process improvements.  This approach uses a team comprised of knowledgeable stakeholders from the both the plant site and Crane Nuclear working together to tackle outage work delays and inefficiencies.  The Columbia Kaizens have been associated with schedule and duration impacts, with the resulting improvements allowing predictable outage valve work schedules and budgets.  A recent Wolf Creek Kaizen was specific to MOV overthrust events, but it also highlighted lapses within the site’s MOV Program in keeping up with industry best practices.  Finally, the Susquehanna Kaizen Event was about eliminating reworks to remove the risk associated with schedule impacts.  Mike Rhodes (Columbia AOV Program Manager) stated the following regarding Columbia’s experience with Kaizen Events, “Crane’s Kaizen Events are a great opportunity to learn from mistakes, improve processes, and grow as a team.  It’s a true team environment that promotes self-reflection from both parties where nothing is left off the table.  We’ve found them highly productive and beneficial.”  Given the savings and productivity gains possible from conducting Kaizen Events, all plants are encouraged to take advantage of this process improvement resource via our supplier partnership with Crane Nuclear.