As quickly as possible

As if that weren’t challenging enough, the job also must be completed as quickly as possible to minimize downtime for the plant. Utilities usually try to schedule maintenance work during an SGR project, but that doesn’t mitigate the loss of power generation—and revenue—that accompanies an outage.

It takes expertise and vast experience in the nuclear power industry to pull off a successful steam generator replacement. That's why plant owners turn to Bechtel. We designed and built many nuclear plants in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, and since the 1990s, we have performed more than 30 SGR projects, helping extend plant life in the United States and elsewhere.

Currently, we are finishing the first of two SGR projects at San Onofre in Southern California, and we recently signed a contract to perform a similar job at Davis-Besse in Ohio. Bechtel was the architect engineer for both San Onofre and Davis-Besse when  those units were constructed in the 1970s and '80s. We also performed a reactor pressure vessel head replacement at Davis-Besse in 2002.