Westinghouse-led Team Touts Lessons Learned At RCP Installation

Using a learn as you go, best practices model, Westinghouse Electric Company said Friday that, along with an international team of nuclear construction powerhouses – Sanmen Nuclear Power Company, Shandong Nuclear Power Company, State Nuclear Power Engineering Company and China Nuclear Industry Fifth Construction Company – it had been able to reduce installation time for reactor coolant pumps (RCP) at two construction sites by 37 percent, comparing the second installation to the first.

AP1000The lessons learned will be applied to subsequent RCP projects, Westinghouse said, including AP1000 design reactor construction at Sanmen Unit 2 and Haiyang Unit 2, as well as the four AP1000 reactors under construction in the United States, two at the Vogtle plant in Waynesboro, Ga., and two at the V.C. Summer plant in Jenkinsville, S.C.

The company has already programmed lessons learned from the recent installations into the upcoming RCP projects, Westinghouse said in a statement.

The five-company team has together installed eight RCPs at the world's first AP1000 nuclear power plants under construction in China. The process was improved by 11 days – after an initial installation process took 30 days – thanks to the return on experience gained from the first RCP installation at Sanmen Unit 1 in Zhejiang Province. Those lessons were applied to the second installation, which occurred at the Haiyang Unit 1 project in Shandong Province.

In total, eight RCPs were installed between January and April, four at each reactor project. The first installation at Sanmen Unit 1 in January took 30 days to complete. However, a key component to the improved installation time was the application of lessons learned at each of the subsequent installations. With that in mind, the second installation of four RCPs at Haiyang Unit 1 took only 19 days, Westinghouse said.

Westinghouse senior vice president New Plants and Major Projects Jeff Benjamin stressed the experience banked on high-quality installations, which were pulled off, he said,  “without any safety-related incidents or quality issues.”

The experience we've gained from these RCP installations to improve installation speed and performance have moved us beyond the first-of-kind issues and are driving us to Nth-of-a-kind delivery for the AP1000 fleet under construction,” he said.

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