Per WSJ, Ukraine stopped buying nuclear fuel from Russia after their invasion in 2022. Russia had been their top supplier and nuclear power accounted for more than half of Ukraine’s electricity generation.
Westinghouse stepped in to help. They are now making fuel bundles that are compatible with all of the country’s reactors and are working on a plan that would allow Ukraine to start making some of that fuel itself. Kyiv also plans to build nine Westinghouse-designed reactors.
Russia was traditionally the only supplier for fuel bundles, which package enriched uranium into a container that can be loaded in a reactor, for Soviet-designed VVER reactors of which 34 operate across the EU and Ukraine. Due to Ukraine’s urgent need, Westinghouse sped up a project that allowed them to ramp up nuclear fuel production for Ukraine’s reactors, while simultaneously increasing fuel production for other reactors in Europe.
The project required Westinghouse to quickly source new machinery and rework its factory floor in Sweden, changing traditional ways of working in a tightly-regulated sector that often moves at a glacial pace. Westinghouse was able to cut a quarter of the time needed for a two-year process. They had no road map for speeding up manufacturing, but set up a task force of 60 people, including a smaller core group that held weekly meetings to assess progress and identify potential bottlenecks, to achieve success.
MOSIMTEC simulation modeling can support multiple needs for nuclear power plants – outage planning (scheduled and unscheduled), commissioning/decommissioning plans and more. MOSIMTEC recently developed a digital twin (DT) for a nuclear fuel fabrication and assembly site. The DT has three areas of focus: (1) specification formation, model development and output validation of the model to accurately represent the system and processes (2) accurate and timely integrated data of the following data attributes: demand, materials/parts, work in process, resource status, and related information from relevant enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution systems (MES) and (3) organizational change management to maintain the relevant data and follow the plan as generated (rather than ad hoc decisions made on the manufacturing floor).
The deployed simulation-based planning and scheduling solution provides the fuel fabrication facility with an environment to do what-if analysis (a sandbox environment for performance improvement and optimization) as well as the dynamic development of both short-term detailed scheduling and long-term capacity planning. Developing a new feasible plan now takes a few hours instead of a few weeks. MOSIMTEC data scientists and industrial engineers can help you future-proof your business.
Keywords: Nuclear Power, Electricity Generation, Westinghouse, manufacturing, Ukraine, Russia, nuclear fuel, fuel bundles, nuclear reactors, futureproofyourbusiness