Editor

When the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station has an outage, a period every 18 months when the plant is “shut down,” not actually producing power, that’s when everyone heads for the beach, right?

They wish.

For all of the the employees at the plant, the outage is actually the most intensive period of work.

Robert Yanity, SCANA Public Affairs officer described it this way: “every 18 months we refuel, because V.C. Summer is a baseload plant, we run it 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“When the plant is shut down, the work is done safely to get it back up and running,” he said.

An outage typically lasts 35-40 days, said Yanity.

While the plant is not operating, SCE&G has to provide the electricity from another source, such as a natural gas plant, which might be a little more expensive.

“When we do a refueling outage, we want to do those tasks that we can’t do while the plant is online,” Yanity explained, “like preventative maintenance and any issues that might have come up during the operating cycle.”

Maintenance, modifications and tasks to be done and during the outage are carefully planned and scheduled, and in fact, as soon as one outage ends, the next one is being planned, said Yanity.

V.C. Summer employee John Thompson said, “most people probably assume we all go to the beach or something, because we’re not having to work because there’s no power being generated. But it’s just the opposite, We’re in a period of hyper-work during an outage.”

People like Thompson, George Fricks, Phyllis Jolley, Sherri Mathis and Donna Railey change their “plant online” jobs for their “outage” jobs, and in most cases, they are some of the people that deal with the in-processing of a small army of contractors, what SCE&G calls “supplemental employees.”

During the outage, the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station may see an influx of some 750 contractors on-site, but not all at the same time. In fact, some of the contractors’ jobs may not come into effect until close to the end of the outage.

As Phyllis Jolley describes it, there’s a whole group of what might be termed “migrant plant workers” who make their living moving from plant to plant, working outages.

“We’ve had contractors come here straight from other plants; they might have driven all night, it could have been someone who’s traveled from California, and it could be the guy down the street coming in,” she said.

“We have contractors who specialize in literally anything from engineers, to health physics technicians, all kinds of maintenance personnel, scaffold builders painters, carpenters, forklift drivers to a unit of people who do basic cleaning,” said John Thompson.

“There are some jobs that can’t be performed while the reactor is under power that you take the opportunity to do,” put in George Fricks.

Yanity added, “the outage work is 24 hours, round the clock. There are folks on day shift and night shift out here,” he said.

When a contractor arrives on site, the team of people processing them have a checklist of steps that take place. First of course is verifying identity; security is a high priority in these post-September 11 days. Contractors are then issued a parking pass, and given a outage refueling manual that tells what SCE&G expects of them and lays out a lot of procedures, especially safety procedures.

Next is a period of training similar to what a regular V.C. Summer employee receives, “part of that includes fitness for duty requirements. We’re required to be drug free and alcohol free and fit to perform our duties,” said Thompson.

“Then we go into our plant access training, and that covers such things as the expectations from security, what they need to know in the event of an emergency situation, industrial safety, because it is very much an industrial safety setting,” Thompson said.

“We also get them prepared to work in areas where there’s radiation and radioactive material, so we have radiation protection and respiratory protection training,” he said.

Jeff Archie, the vice president in charge of nuclear operations, added, “the culture here is a safety first culture. Because we’re so heavily regulated from so many standpoints, SCE&G has high standards (that the contractors must meet). This is just about one of the safest places that anybody could work,” he said.”

He added, the contractors may be skilled in their own areas, such as carpentry or painting, and many of them may have previous experience with nuclear power, either from working at other plants or being trained, say, by the U.S. Navy, but V.C. Summer makes sure those contractors are supervised by an SCE&G supervisor, or by long-term contractors who are familiar with V.C. Summer Station policies and procedures while they are at the plant.

Archie said that having an on-site security force is not intimidating to the contractors, either.

He compared the increased presence of security at the plant to that of any major airport.

“It makes people feel more secure when working out here,” he said.

Archie emphasized, everything the contractors do is performed to exacting SCE&G standards, whether it’s cleaning the floors or building scaffolds.

“There are a lot of different skill-sets. We only bring in the folks we need, and those that we bring in, we have very specific tasks for them to do,” he said.

Refit and repair

of the nuclear plant

The V.C. Summer Station employees are also working during an outage. Archie likes to say that most plant employees have three jobs: their normal operations job, an “outage job” and an emergency planning job. People switch over to their outage jobs during a refueling outage.

People like Robert Justice, Jr., Fairfield County resident and manager of the maintenance department for the plant. During this outage, Justice’s team were replacing the large spacers on some pipes that carry water to cool the steam that is used to turn the turbines that generate electricity.

Working from the specially-constructed scaffolds, Justice’s team replaced the spacers, then tightened down each of the bolts securing the spacer between each pipe.

Also during this outage, Justice’s team finished final installation of a vacuum pump that replaced one that has been in operation since the plant started.

During the outage, SCE&G takes advantage of the “down time” (if you could call it that) to perform maintenance on the machinery of the plant. For example, during this outage, workers took advantage of the time the plant was not under load to tear down, inspect and replace parts of the high-pressure turbines that support generation of electricity.

The on-site Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) inspectors work independently from SCE&G to provide oversight during the outage, said Archie.

“When we go into the reactor building (during an outage) they’re very close behind us, doing a visual inspection to make sure everything looks as they expect it to look.

“When we close out the reactor building, they support us on final close-out, making sure no tools are left there that could interfere with any of the operation of the equipment inside the containment building, We also have a lot of inspections that occur during the course of the outage,” he said.

“For example, the first two weeks of this outage, we had an HP (health physics) NRC inspection and review, because (during an outage) the NRC wants to come in and take a look at us when we have work going on in the reactor building. That’s a great time to gauge your performance,” said Archie.

Another thing that happens during an outage is the plant actually replaces one-third of the fuel in the reactor core during each outage and stores the spent fuel on site, said Archie.

At many different levels, there’s a lot taking place during the refueling outage at the nuclear station, and while people may think an outage means less work, the people at V.C. Summer can tell you, it’s no day at the beach for them.