Quality improvement in Pickering retubing/rehabilitation outages

Retubing of CANDU reactors has progressed from single channel replacements in the seventies through to large-scale replacement programs in the eighties and nineties. Significant changes in the approach to the task have taken place in order to make the outage duration, dose uptake and costs acceptable. This has been achieved by reducing radiation fields, designing shields, and planning to shorten the job. The organization and roles of the work groups involved (Construction, Operations and Design) were carefully designed to ensure a focused team approach to the outage. The work to be done is carefully detailed, and logically planned. The outage itself involves many Operations activities that must be completed before Construction begins its work on the reactor. Once work begins, all activities are monitored and controlled from the Retubing Control Centre. Removal of highly radioactive components is done entirely by remotely controlled tools. Once the reactor is retubed, systems must be restarted and tested to ensure that licensing requirements are met. 1 tab