Duke Energy has claimed world records for quick duration and low dose at Westinghouse PWRs with ice condenser containments following a 21 day 1 hour outage at Catawba 1. The previous record at a Westinghouse ice condenser unit was 23 days at Sequoyah 2 in 2000.
Duke attributed the speed of the outage to the use of an outage control centre (OCC), where all the major outage decision makers worked in one area and were in constant contact with each other. Duke used the OCC idea after learning of it from Exelon’s Braidwood plant.
Duke’s goal is to get routine outages at all its reactors down to about 20 days.
There are nine Westinghouse PWRs with ice condenser containments in the USA, and two in Japan.
