CLIENT SPECIFICS

The primary purpose of a nuclear plant outage is to proceed with the replacement of part of the fuel. To do so, the reactor’s tank must be opened, the fuel extracted, then after refuelling the tank must be closed and components put back into restart configuration.

PONTICELL’S CHALLENGES

In France there are about 50 plant outages every year, the opening/closing of tanks are on an outage’s critical path, they take place in 3×8, 7/7 shift work. Working simultaneously on several plants is a major constraint for resource management.

SCOPE

Being mainly equipment handling/lifting and assembly/disassembly operations linked to the reactor’s core, these operations require a high level of nuclear safety culture from those involved.