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 (Hope Creek & Salem).  Engagement and interaction among the AOV and MOV stakeholders at our member stations remains strong.  Nine USA Jump-Up Calls on emergent valve issues have been conducted in the past 12 months, 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 all 16 of our available 2024 classes having been allocated.  The plants that requested no-rental-fee valve diagnostic systems via our valve services contract worked well together to coordinate delivery dates.  Six free diagnostic systems were used by Cook, Comanche Peak, and Diablo Canyon for Fall 2023 outages.  For the Spring 2024 outages, seven free diagnostic systems were used by STP, Cook, Wolf Creek, and Diablo Canyon.  We have continued our robust, well-established information exchange of valve-related benchmarking topics, technical questions, and operating experience; with 77 AOV and 22 MOV benchmarking questions disseminated thus far in 2024.

Our semi-annual “Lessons Learned from Outage Valve Work” online sessions for the Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 outages were held in January and July, respectively.  The meetings were 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.  Several cohorts of students have now graduated from 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.  Having those new valve technicians integrated into the outage workforce is a welcomed infusion of new-to-nuclear contractors, with them quickly gaining experience working alongside seasoned technicians.

For 2024, much of our focus during various benchmarking sessions has related to knowledge transfer/proficiency, valve packing, ASME OM Code Mandatory Appendix IV implementation, Main Steam Isolation Valves (MSIVs), Feedwater Regulating Valves (FRVs), and obsolescence/alternate sources for parts.  We now have periodic AOV Engineering Proficiency online sessions about every four months.  Given the number of plants that will be implementing Mandatory Appendix IV (AOV performance acceptance testing) during their upcoming IST 10-Year Updates, we also conduct Appendix IV Lessons Learned Sessions every few months.  In June, we had our in-person Summer AOV Benchmarking Session at Xcel Energy focusing on MSIVs and FRVs.  And finally, due to a variety of factors impacting the global supply chain, the industry has seen a significant increase in lead times for valve and actuator parts.  Tim Scoggins (USA Valve Team Program Manager) emphasized, “To help mitigate the impact of increasingly longer lead times and missed parts delivery dates, the USA Valve Team has made it a point to discuss alternate sources for hard-to-find parts and those with long lead times.  During most of our meetings, we dedicate time to discuss parts and alternate sourcing options such as Paragon, Park Nuclear, Framatome Nuclear Parts Center, Georgia Western, RAPID, etc.  This ongoing focus helps raise awareness among valve personnel and I am always available to help our plants with these sorts of valve parts searches.”