It’s no secret that power generation equipment requires maintenance and power plants need to shut down to perform outages. Utilities have come to realize how important a well-run outage is to the company’s bottom line. Typical nuclear refueling outages in the past were 3 to 4 months, now they are 3 to 4 weeks. Proper planning makes a successful outage. You must have a good plan, and a good team to complete all tasks.

When carrying out maintenance work on equipment like Generators, Turbines, Valves, and Pumps it must be accomplished promptly and with great detail. From critical path work to routine task can all take advantage of Laser cleaning technology to reduce rebuild time. Our Laser is a productivity tool that cleans with precision.

Many best practices are already implemented and saving a lot of time. Teams must identify technology options that have the potential to reduce overall costs and reduces outage durations. The goal is to redesign programs and processes to improve their efficiency and effectiveness. The past thought process of “This is the way we have always done this” is not a good behavior. Implementation of innovative repair techniques will reduce outage frequency, reduce outage length, and increase plant availability.

Cleaning with Laser light is a whole new way to work on equipment. In the past we had to let equipment soak in chemicals solutions, and clean by hand with wire brushes and Scotch-Brite. These are all very time-consuming processes. Now we use Laser light to clean up to 15 times faster. What took hours in the past now takes minutes. A very different approach but very effective to get equipment back together and back in service.

We are providing an innovation solution that reduces outage length and continues to enhance the already high levels of safety and reliability. What can we do today to improve the processes in the future?