Precision cooling for a nuclear power plant
Client Large nuclear power plant
Location USA
Sectors Utilities
The challenge
Cooling that couldn't afford to fail
All equipment needs maintenance, but when you’re talking about a nuclear power plant, there's no room for error. So when a customer needed to service the valves on their component cooling water (CCW) system, they asked us for help. The CCW’s job is to keep the spent fuel pool (SFP) at a certain temperature, but maintenance would mean blocking it from the spent fuel heat exchanger (SFPHX), leaving the SFP without any way to cool down.
With downtime not an option, we needed to find a way to remove up to 26 MMBtu/h from the SFPHX while the CCW was offline – no small task. Another challenge was space. The plot area wasn’t large, so any system we put in place would have to be quite compact to fit.
Project fact file
SFP cooling cannot stop at any time
Amount of heat that needed removing
Temporary spent fuel pool cooling units
During component cooling water (CCW) system maintenance
The solution
A complete system in two parts
Bringing in refrigeration units, generators and cooling towers along with fuel tanks, pumps and other components, we built a temporary spent fuel cooling system that would keep processes running smoothly and safely during the CCW maintenance.
To cope with the small plot space, we split the system into two smaller units, which could operate independently and handle 100% of the load if they had to. These units sat several hundred feet apart with an aqueduct to transfer water across the plant roadway.
the aggreko difference
Our customers need complete confidence. That's why we're here.
The impact
Business as usual with no downtime
The project was a complete success, with no downtime at all. Once the fixed CCW was up and running again, we took down the temporary cooling system and it was back to business as usual.
$9.9 million US cost savings in one year
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