The Plant Services Division has completed their Spring 2009 work and are happy to be back home after more than a month away. What started as a very busy work period, declined somewhat and then picked back up. Two utilities cancelled contracts already in place, and two others delayed work until their next outage under the guise of reducing costs. Yes, the economic situation has been hitting everyone. 
A northern utility planned to replace 6 Incore Thimbles this Spring. We won the contract to do the early thimble prep work in their warehouse and then perform the insertion and new high pressure seal make up later on in the outage. We encouraged them to do this prior to the outage, and they concurred.
The warehouse work consisted of cleaning the 6 new thimbles (we actually did 7 with one going into their other Unit this Fall), then measured and cut them to length for each specific core location, and finally expanded the upper 1-1/2” for proper diameter to fit the new Swagelok fittings.
Later, we had two multi-trip jobs at DC Cook and Braidwood that kept us running from the second week of March through the third week of April. At Cook we performed our usual Thimble Cleaning and Seal Table Disassembly/Thimble Retraction work, then split crews and rushed over to Braidwood to start the Thimble Cleaning there. We were joined by the second half of the crew the next day to help us finish the job.
The group finished work at Braidwood and traveled back over to the Cook plant. There we took conduit ferrule measurements to determine the suitability of the installed fittings, inserted all 58 thimbles, re-made the high pressure fittings and assembled the rack back together for the plant to be able to “fill and vent” and began the process of startup.
All the work at the Seal Table at Braidwood was performed in “Versa Hoods”, a Powered Air Purifying Respiratory device (PAPR). 
This is a fairly comfortable device, that does limit your vision and communication capabilities somewhat, but enables us to stay free of facial contamination during all facets of our work.
The BCP crew consisted of eight working members, with Mark Beggs and Tim Morgan as the shift supervisors, Mike Volpe and Brian Brinkerhoff as the shift lead techs, and shift crew members Chris Castro, Todd Donnelly Kacy Channell, and Danny Lecher.
Click Here to Subscribe and receive the latest job postings and news directly to your email inbox!
