Nuclear Plant Turns To Asset ManagementNuclear Plant Turns To Asset Management

There hasn't been a nuclear reactor built in the United States by a power company in more than 20 years, and most of the business-technology systems and processes that existing plants use are about as old. But, as the demand for energy grows, reactor owners are modernizing their IT systems and processes to cut costs and improve efficiency.

The nuclear-power industry is making strides in developing and sharing best practices. But there remain too many standalone processes and unintegrated systems, says Vince Gilbert, a special adviser at the Nuclear Energy Institute. "No one has been able to start with a clean sheet of paper to develop and integrate processes for standard computer management, equipment reliability, and work management," Gilbert says.

There are 103 nuclear reactors on 64 sites in 31 states. Each can generate about 1,000 megawatts of power. Many still rely on mainframes and legacy applications. But some are mothballing those systems and moving to commodity hardware and commercial applications, such as asset-management software, to provide more real-time management capabilities.

Take the threat from lightning. "We've always used relay protection for such problems, and we always want to learn why a given relay didn't protect us," says Greg Kann, project manager at FPL Energy's Seabrook Station, a nuclear power plant between Hampton, Hampton Falls, and Seabrook, N.H. But it wasn't always easy to find the problem. "They did everything from scratch before."

Kann worked with MRO Software Inc. to develop an asset-management application customized for the nuclear industry. It's designed to integrate work, asset, and supply-chain management and provide plant managers with greater flexibility and real-time reports from workers in the field. Seabrook is the first customer for the Maximo Nuclear software, which MRO will begin selling to others this month.

Seabrook's construction started back in 1976, but it didn't begin operations until 1990. FPL acquired the plant, which resides on 900 acres, in the fall of 2002. As a merchant plant for FPL, Seabrook is expected to generate more than a million megawatts of energy this year, which is available to the highest bidder. That's why it's important to keep costs in line.

MRO developed the asset-management software to run on commodity hardware to help power plants move away from the inflexible mainframes they currently use. The average price for the software, which runs on Unix and Windows, is expected to be around $200,000.

The software already has proven its worth, Kann says. Employees assigned to work on problems are getting much better information in their work orders. "We're dealing with lightning strikes much better now," he says. Plus, "we couldn't get reports out of our old systems. Moving forward, we'll have integration between our work orders and document management. We never did anything like that before."

Such integration is a big step forward for the industry. "Before, each plant had its own proprietary business processes, and they weren't performing well," says Pete Karns, industry marketing manager at MRO. "One day down means a million dollars in losses."

In a consolidating industry--Exelon operates 17 nuclear reactors, Entergy runs 10, and Southern, six--it's important to cooperate to improve performance. The Nuclear Energy Institute provides a central clearinghouse and creates "communities of practice" to share information on topics such as outages or workload management. Says MRO's Karns: "Companies are working together now, implementing new processes and training people."