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Specialized Energy Construction Services

Nuclear Plant Water Cooled Neutral Bus Project

Southern Tennessee

The owner of a nuclear power plant in Southern Tennessee experienced an outage due to a leak on a Westinghouse water-cooled neutral bus assembly.  Unable to resolve the leak, they understood that without proper expertise, they ran the risk of incurring additional downtime.

One of the challenges was that the Isophase Bus and Generator OEMs were unable to assist.  Our team had to reverse engineer the units with modern procedures, fabrication techniques and machining, while avoiding the costly process of evaluating changing designs in the nuclear environment.  Additionally, the owner had a tight delivery schedule, a quick proposal cycle and a short project life cycle.

Our team was able to use our flexibility, engineering and technical capabilities in order to meet the unique material specifications.  This included procuring custom copper square tubing extrusions which consisted of non-standard material, lengths and extrusions.  Additionally, we procured custom dies for bending square copper tubing.  Our team machined custom copper fittings, stainless steel tubing and flanges.  We also developed modernized brazing and soldering WPS as a 1950’s era welding procedure specifications was referenced but not provided by the owner or the OEM.  Finally, we constructed a brazing oven capable of holding the entire assembly.

Our efforts resulted in a successful completion of the project, acceptance testing and on-time delivery for the customer.