News

The USA Valve Team is comprised of 19 plant sites in total, including the 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. Adjusting to the modified communication and support needs due to pandemic mitigation strategies was relatively seamless for this long-established group whose members have worked with each other for years. A good example of this was immediately switching to remote support of the ongoing Power-Operated Valve (POV) Self-Assessments being done by each plant in preparation for the NRC’s POV Design Basis Assurance Inspections per NRC Inspection Plan 71111.21N.02 – Design-Basis Capability of Power-Operated Valves Under 10 CFR 50.55a Requirements.

The industry’s first NRC Inspection under this new POV focus began with Cooper in January 2020. Prior to this NRC inspection, Cooper conducted a pre-inspection assessment with onsite external peers in September 2019. Five other pre-inspection self-assessments were completed between December 2019 and February 2020 with onsite external peers at Prairie Island, Fermi, Monticello, Wolf Creek, and PSEG. After COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in March 2020, the remaining 14 pre-inspection POV Self-Assessments were all conducted with remote external peer support between June 2020 and June 2022. Documents were shared via file sharing sites and email, while all communication was done via online meetings, phone calls, and email. While this was a sudden change in our normal approach to external peer support, it was an efficient and cost-effective means to continue reaping the valuable insight of external assessment team peers even when conditions did not allow for travel. Numerous MOV and AOV Engineers within our Valve Team, as well as from other fleets, volunteered to be external peers for these 19 assessments and their support was outstanding.

Other noteworthy items have been successfully completed amid varying levels of travel restrictions during the past couple of years. Re-bid and award of the USA Valve Services Agreement was completed in 2021. The USA Valve Team’s exchange of industry AOV and MOV technical questions and benchmarking requests via email inquiries reached an all-time high in 2021, with 75 AOV topics and 55 MOV topics. (This year is on track to match or exceed these numbers.) During both June and November of 2021, online benchmarking meetings were conducted for the AOV and MOV subgroups. Our 2021 Valve Services Challenge Meeting for sharing outage lessons learned and best practices was successfully completed via online sessions in July 2021. In July of this year, we held two Valve Packing Sessions to compare processes, practices, and materials used by each station. Utilization of our free training slots and no-rental-fee diagnostic equipment via the USA Valve Service Agreement also remained strong during 2021, providing significant monetary savings to numerous member plants.

A relatively new positive development is the expansion of personnel sharing to include AOV and MOV Engineers supporting outages at other plants. Thanks to Bill Trappett (Columbia MOV Engineer) and Mike Rhodes (Columbia AOV Engineer) for stepping up to support the Spring 2022 Fermi Outage. Regarding any site-specific training needed for Bill and Mike, Aaron Blaharski (Fermi MOV Engineer) stated, “They both got a crash course in Teledyne QuikLook. I also had Bill checking all of my MOV Thrust Test Target Worksheets – so he got training on how Fermi develops those, navigating our various design calcs, databases, etc. Since they are both experienced guys, all of the other site required qualifications were easy to process equivalent training forms for based on their Columbia qualifications.”

While at Fermi, Bill and Mike conducted diagnostic test trace reviews, Work Order sign-offs for testing, wrote CRs, supported maintenance and testing in the field, various in-body and actuator inspections, Magnesium rotor motor inspections, and answered packing questions. Bill Trappett offered this insight about his experience at Fermi, “The resource sharing is very beneficial to our station. Sometimes it’s difficult to find really good SMEs in the industry to support our refueling outages. It’s also an advantage to bring back lessons learned to improve our programs.” From Fermi’s perspective on this personnel sharing experience, Aaron Blaharski added, “Since they are both program owners themselves, they were able to independently reach out to industry contacts (that Fermi may or may not have had) when we need outside help, vendor information, etc. Both Bill and Mike were a tremendous help and were willing to do anything we asked of them. They already knew many of the valve contract personnel that were onsite, so it was very easy to integrate them into the various teams and projects – no one was really starting from scratch trying to figure out who was who. As the site program owners, we had full confidence that they would make the best decisions for the programs when we couldn’t be there. It was a long, slow, difficult outage, but they were right there with us. Would have them back anytime.” Fermi has already made plans to reciprocate to Columbia with Aaron Blaharski confirmed to support Columbia’s Spring 2023 Outage.

For 2022, several new initiatives are currently being pursued by the USA Valve Team. Eight of the nine USA plants are involved in the preliminary stages of a project with Crane Nuclear to evaluate the feasibility of online MOV monitoring. The goal of this initiative is to implement hardware and software designed to automatically perform the regulatory required MOV data acquisition and analysis without having to conduct the traditional intrusive at-the-valve MOV diagnostic tests, with a stated goal reducing the current cost of at-the-valve MOV testing by as much as 80%. On the AOV side, based on an ongoing project at Palo Verde, our plants are regularly interfacing to learn how to best set up the performance diagnostic capabilities that are already available within Fisher DVC Digital Positioners and other manufacturer’s digital positioners. Anticipated in October 2022, the NRC’s upcoming endorsement of NEI Efficiency Bulletin 17-06 via NRC Regulatory Guide 1.250 (Dedication of Commercial-Grade Digital I&C Items for Use in Nuclear Power Plants) will greatly simplify the ability for using AOV digital positioners in both safety-related and non-safety related applications. Another focus is to continue expanding AOV and MOV Engineer outage support via personnel sharing, with likely prospects for peer support at the Prairie Island in Fall 2022. As stated by Tim Scoggins (Program Manager, USA Valve Team), “The real strength of our USA Valve Team comes from the willingness of all of our members to support each other, offer and be receptive to new ideas, and put in the work required to make positive changes that continually improve safety and lower operating costs.”