AREVA honors Dominion's Millstone plant with Vendor Award

AREVA Inc. presented Dominion Generation's Millstone Nuclear Power Station with its Vendor Award during the Nuclear Energy Institute's Nuclear Energy Assembly this week in Washington, D.C., AREVA said on Thursday.

"The innovative thinking of the team at the Millstone Power Station is a prime example of the work going on at plants every day across the country to deliver safe, reliable nuclear energy in a cost-effective way,” Gary Mignogna, president and CEO of AREVA, said. “We are honored to present the team with this award.”

The award signifies the Waterford, Connecticut, power station's ability to develop innovative approaches to the challenges associated with steam generators. Engineers and chemists from both companies were able to formulate a plan that was successful in reducing deposits on one side of the Millstone 3 Unit steam generators. The team was able to come up with a plan that utilized a chemical cleaning process from AREVA during a regular refueling outage. By performing refueling and deposit-removal activity at the same time, reactor personnel were able to increase efficiency and allows the reactor to continue operations without additional outages.

Deposits of the iron oxide magnetite are a common by-product and will accumulate over time. For a reactor to operate safely and efficiently, deposits of magnetite must be removed on a regular basis.