Contact: Edward Conaway
361-972-7643
ecconaway@stpegs.com
www.stpegs.com

Wadsworth, Texas -- June 27, 2001 -- A trio of creative employees at the South Texas Project (STP) nuclear power plant has received a U.S. Patent on an award-winning invention. The machine they developed can improve safety and lower operating costs at nuclear plants worldwide.

The device mechanically cleans the massive bolts, or studs, that hold the head of a nuclear reactor in place between refuelings. Cleaning the studs previously was a difficult manual task; each of the 72 studs in STP’s two reactors is eight feet long and weighs 1,500 pounds.

The Reactor Stud Cleaning Booth was created by John Griffin, an STP Maintenance Supervisor. Griffin conceptualized and designed the 12-foot-tall, nearly two-ton device, and managed its production. Mechanic/welder William Mikulenka and Machinist Alan Plunkett designed, fabricated and machined its components and controls, and assembled and tested the invention.

Although other stud cleaning devices exist, the STP invention has several fea-tures the others lack. It allows studs to be cleaned vertically, which eliminates the work, time and risk of manually lowering them onto their sides using chains and an A-frame hoist. The machine also cleans two studs at once, twice the capacity of other devices, and reduces cleaning time from three or four hours to 20 minutes or less per stud.

In addition, the invention uses a cleaning agent in an enclosed system. Other cleaning devices entail manual brushing that generates airborne contamination. The Reactor Stud Cleaning Booth eliminates that contamination and the associated low-level waste of cleaning rags, pads and brushes. The STP machine also has a filtering system that removes contaminants from the cleaning agent, which is then re-circulated and reused. This also pares the amount of waste generated during stud cleaning.

Together, the various improvements reduced the work of stud cleaning from 750 to 144 labor-hours per refueling outage and shortened the task's timeline from more than five days to a single day. The associated cost savings, projected over the currently licensed life of the plant, exceed $2 million.

The invention was honored with a Top Industry Practice Award from the national Nuclear Energy Institute when the machine was unveiled in 1999. The award cited the device for significantly improving plant refueling operations.

The patent is just the second one issued to the plant since it began operations in 1988, and the first since the STP Nuclear Operating Company replaced Houston Lighting & Power as the plant's manager in 1997. The earlier patent was granted for a specialized lifting device, also invented by an employee.

STP is owned by AEP Central Power and Light Company, Austin Energy, City Public Service of San Antonio, and Reliant Energy HL&P. The plant produces 2,500 megawatts of electricity, enough to serve more than one million homes.