Please pardon my ignorance.

[gamma_ray]

Please pardon my ignorance,

During an outage, what do the ops guys do? 

Just curious.  I honestly know nothing about civilian plants.

Thanks.

[ranger2]

Shutdown the outage unit
Continue to operate the non-outage unit(s) at multiple unit sites
Continue to perform regularly scheduled surveillances
Shutdown and drain most of the major primary and secondary systems
Tagout said systems (perhaps manipulate said tagout many times)
Perform a myriad of tests that can not be done at power
Process water and gas
Perform any system manipulations required (valve, pump, switchyard operations)
Supervise refueling activities (SRO)
Clear tagouts
Refill systems
Startup and retest systems
Startup the plant

(just to name a few)

[kp88]

During an outage, what do the ops guys do? 

During a planned or forced outage, day shift complains about night shift.  Night shift complains about day shift.  Other than that, we can't exactly turn off the lights and go home.

[gamma_ray]

I get it.  I just wasn't sure where the line between maintenance techs and operators is drawn for these situations.  Thanks for the information.  It certainly wouldn't make sense to turn off the lights and go home.

[Smooth Operator]

The line can be blurry at non-union plants specifically the 3 non-Union plants I have been a house employee at...

Specifically where to draw the line with electrical manips as far as operating and testing breakers...some NLOs touch breakers and some don't and that varies by company and site. At my current plant, Operators rack in and out breakers and EMD does the bench testing and repairs. I have also seen them in the panels doing testing. I have also been involved in a coordinated effort racking in a 480v MCC while EMD was on the other side of the panel doing diagnostics.

Like I said, the line is set by the company and the bargaining agreement as applicable.

Ranger2 nailed the rest of it.

[gamma_ray]

Sounds good.  I guess the biggest reason I was asking is concern for actually being able to continuously work if I go into Ops.
It sounds like there's plenty to do.

[B.PRESGROVE]

Im curious in this discussion, what is the main difference in a nonunion plant and union plant.  Are the job roles clearly seperated? 

[Smooth Operator]

I can't speak to any specific bargaining agreement, but I work at a non-union plant as an NLO and do stuff that any other NLO would do plus Elec, HP, Chem, Predictive, Maint related stuff.

Oh how I long for the place where I can do rounds, tests, and clearances and the other depts actually do their own work 100%.

I swear to the heavens that OPs at my plant bats clean-up.

[Nuclear NASCAR]

Im curious in this discussion, what is the main difference in a nonunion plant and union plant.  Are the job roles clearly seperated? 

That is one of the main differences.  In a union plant an operator isn't going to be removing a pump, for example, mechanical maintenance would be. 

As to efficiency, that's a matter for another thread based partly upon ones opinion of unions. 

[ranger2]

At my union plant, the roles are clearly separated for the most part. Recently, OPS needed a jumper installed. This could have been done in a few minutes by an operator, but it was electrician work. Unfortunately there were no electricians working that shift (weekend backshift). Had OPS installed the jumper, a grievance surely would have been filed. In this case, the job waited. You can draw your own conclusions regarding efficiency from this anecdotal example.

[Fermi2]

It doesn't matter whether it's union or not. It simply matters as to what the utility determined an Operator's work to be. At Fermi a Union NLO plant operators installed jumpers, lifted leads, installed test gages, took vibes, and performed their own radcon within bounds of reason. They also hooked up flukes and instrumentation required to perform evolutions. They also hooked up their own fittings and hoses. They also wrote tagouts and in some cases reviewed them too. NLOs performed switching and took switching orders.

At SQN a Union Plant Operators don't do any of that I think it's more a matter of making a choice to not qualify operators to do so than anything.

So far as ROs, Fermi was Non Union and SQN is Union. At Fermi the ROs were at one time considered supervisory yet at SQN they perform far more supervisory functions and probably do more on a day to day basis to organize work than their counterparts at Fermi. In fact they probably do about 90% of the work a Unit Supervisor at Fermi did. Again, it's the choice the Utility made. The other difference is at Fermi they wrote tagouts and did switching. Here there's a 6 week qualification course in order to do so and to date we've put very few ROs through it.

So it's more a matter of choices made than anything.

Mike

[B.PRESGROVE]

Thats interesting, one would think of the traditional union roles when you start talking about work to be done.  You know operators operate, maintenence maintains, electricians elec....tric....s,  sorry bout that last one but you get the drift.  All about the contract and whats in it.