New tool will help plan and schedule maintenance outages.
During the early days of the pandemic, one of many logistical concerns was keeping nuclear operators going during the outage season. Nuclear energy supplies around 10 percent of the world’s energy needs, in over 30 countries, according to the World Nuclear Association. Energy consumption dropped between 10 and 25 percent of expected demand when countries or regions were in lockdown. The association says that most fuel assemblies are used for three years, with reloads taking place every 12 to 18 months. This combination of lower demand and long-lasting fuel supplies helped the nuclear industry to maintain service to customers during a once-in-a-lifetime set of circumstances.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also looked at the short- and long-term effects the pandemic had on the nuclear industry. Workers took on more responsibility to prevent transmission of COVID-19 and showed a renewed commitment to their personal protective equipment. Global supply chain issues have the potential to slow down new construction or refurbishment projects. The IAEA expressed additional concerns for financing future projects.
As part of the solutions to the new challenges faced as the world slowly recovers from the pandemic, GE announced a new partnership between its GE Digital and GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy divisions. Outage Planning and Analytics (OPA) is a new tool that helps nuclear plant engineers with the scheduling and execution of plant refueling and maintenance. The OPA, which is built on GE Digital’s Predix platform, is currently available to U.S. operators that use boiling water or pressurized water reactors.
Four parts of the software were built specifically for nuclear refueling or maintenance shutdowns. The Go Codes and Impact Score analytic shows which activities are cleared for launch based on which upstream tasks are completed. The tool then looks at the impact each activity will have downstream and builds a plan to maximize the activities. The Bow Wave analytic builds a historical picture of which activities run ahead or behind of planned hours and gives users a daily update for current projects. The Delay Category analytic looks at jobs that have been completed and builds a daily delay model with an eye on schedule priority. The Window Threat analytic looks at all the current shutdowns and tries to predict which service stoppages might have the biggest impact. Late activities, time line float loss, and additional work are all events that can increase the perceived threat of a shutdown.
In the short term, the benefits of OPA are cost savings and reduced time with reactors offline. When outages are scheduled for the world’s nuclear reactors every year, the large amounts of data are overwhelming to teams, but the centralized database can help companies and workers find problem areas. GE also says that one-third of workers in the nuclear industry are 55 or older, and the company hopes that this new database can help to reduce the risk of losing that accumulated knowledge as the industry’s workforce begins to retire.
GE has been involved with nuclear power since 1957, when the first nuclear reactor was attached to the grid, and OPA’s development will continue to serve the nuclear industry. Moving forward, the ideal state would be zero pandemics and zero regional shutdowns, but if another pandemic or COVID-19 strain pops up, it’s comforting to know that the Outage Planning and Analytics tool will be there to help minimize the impact.
