A customer’s sister site recently discovered the power of being prepared with the right equipment at the right time…

As this plant was going back online after an outage, early in the power-up phase they detected a leak in a weld. The welder needed to go back down to fix it. Usually, this fix requires several days to disassemble the reactor to reach the welding area. Luckily, our customer (the sister site) came to the rescue…they had a Preferred Engineering Instrument Nozzle Plug on hand and expedited its delivery to the site in need.

This compact, pneumatically actuated plug, can be lowered from the auxiliary platform and maneuvered through the separator to reach the instrument nozzle, allowing the nozzle to be sealed without unlatching. The removable face plate has a high temperature silicone seal outside of the nozzle’s shell cut-out weld, stopping flow both through the nozzle and through the weld to facilitate repair while the separator remains in place.

This product allowed the customer to fix the weld without disassembling the reactor…a huge win for the company and a massive savings.

It was a win that pushed this customer to think ahead. They subsequently decided to stock the Instrument Nozzle Plugs in strategic distribution centers that would allow them to rapidly deploy the device anywhere in their fleet. We’re pleased that our plug saved the day and we will continue to consistently design solutions to the most pressing nuclear maintenance needs.