Some 25 truckloads of equipment are on their way to the Palo Verde station in Arizona as the plant prepares for a clean up.
Framatome ANP recently won the contract to chemically clean steam generators at the station, and the work on unit 1 was due to be performed in September. Site set-up for the spring 2003 cleaning project will begin in November 2002.
Framatome ANP will use a high-temperature chemical cleaning (HTCC) process for both units. As the reactors are shut down, the heat of the plant will be used to heat the solvents to 290ºC. It is not a new process, but, according to the company's task leader for the project, John Remark, it allows for quicker setup and potentially a significantly shorter critical path time. "We utilised this procedure on two units in 1995 and it was very successful," he said. "Our HTCC team will be the first team in and the cleaning of the steam generators will be the first major task accomplished during the outage." Remark said that he anticipates the team to remove approximately 2000kg of corrosion from each of the generators.
More than 60 Framatome ANP engineers and scientists are involved in the project, either on site or coordinating the work from the company's USA headquarters in Lynchburg, Virginia. Most of the equipment being sent to the site will be assembled when it gets there, prior to the outage.
