Holtec Highlights

We are pleased to report that the NRC’s triennial inspection of the Company’s Quality Assurance Program at the Corporate Technology Center in Marlton, New Jersey, was concluded on June 27, 2014. During the exit interview, the NRC inspection team cited NO violations. The weeklong audit by four NRC inspectors evaluated the processes and implementation of various aspects of the Company’s QA Program including engineering design and analysis, configuration and process control, corrective action, audits, training and 10CFR72.48 implementation.  In the close-out meeting, the inspection team praised several elements of our quality program including the composition and comprehensiveness of the technical reports and the corrective action program as well as our document control system. (more…)

Protecting used fuel from damage during periods of operations involving high thermal or mechanical loadings is a key challenge in devising dry storage and transport systems.

Maintaining the fuel in an undamaged state is important to assuring that, in the future, it can be retrieved from storage, if need be, by normal means. As is well known to dry storage specialists, the greatest risk of damage to used fuel occurs during its transition from the wet to the dry state when it is often subjected to intense heat to extract its moisture. As reactor operators have, in recent years, gained improved power generating efficiencies by driving fuel to higher burnups – meaning that it is subject to the effects of bombardment by a greater number of neutrons – increased attention has been placed on the challenge of maintaining fuel integrity after it leaves the reactor. (more…)

We are pleased to report that the construction of a 48-cavity HI-STORM UMAX storage facility at Ameren’s Callaway nuclear plant is proceeding apace. The photograph below shows the status of civil construction work. The first loading campaign, consisting of six MPC-37 canisters, is scheduled to begin in mid-June 2015. The site construction is expected to end in January 2015 and the dry run is scheduled for April-May 2015. (more…)

We are pleased to report that the fifteen yearlong campaign to improve the heavy haul transporters used to move dry spent fuel storage casks has now reached a level of maturity that rivals other Holtec ancillary equipment used to load spent fuel into casks. In the photos below we show the recently designed vertical cask transporters, sold under the trade name HI-LIFT. HI-LIFT is co-produced by the Holtec Manufacturing Division (HMD, Pennsylvania) and J&R Engineering (Wisconsin). The first units entered service in mid-2013 and have fully lived up to industry’s expectations of ruggedness and versatility. (more…)

We congratulate our colleagues at our Orrvilon facility on initiating a new generation of spent nuclear fuel storage baskets that have over ten times the thermal conductivity, one third the weight and twice the structural strength as compared with their stainless steel counterpart. We are proud to observe that these baskets, fabricated entirely of Metamic-HT, represent the very first successful use of nanotechnology in components fabricated for the nuclear power industry. “The straightness, lack of camber, twist or bow in these baskets is unmatched in the nuclear industry,” states Metamic-HT inventor Tom Haynes, Holtec’s VP of Materials Development. The picture perfect profile of these baskets is, in part, due to the use of friction stir welding (which does not suffer from weld distortion endemic to classical welding processes). Friction stir welding is another technology innovation introduced to the nuclear industry by our company over the past year. (more…)