ESR Technology Proudly Sponsors International Nuclear Conference

ESR Technology is proud to have sponsored the 2nd International Conference on Nuclear Power Plants; Structures, Risk and Decommissioning which was held in London last week.

Raghbir Chand, Managing Director of ESR Technology, commented that “whilst the industry was decimated in terms of staff employed in the Nuclear sector, dropping from 8,000 to 500, and with R&D spend reduced from £300M to £5M, ESR Technology is one of the few independent R&D groups that has retained its core capabilities in safety, risk management and engineering design and development. Whilst these skills sets were deployed into other industry sectors such as Oil & Gas, Process/Plant and transportation, with the resurgence of Nuclear, ESR is now well positioned to offer its expertise and capabilities into the Nuclear supply chain. This could be for UK Nuclear projects for integrated design, construction, operation and decommissioning, combined with our experience of working collaboratively with supply chain partners on an integrated and concurrent systems engineering approach to reduce costs of innovation and program delivery.” See ESR's Nuclear capabilities here.

As the sponsor of the event, ESR Technology also presented and exhibited to showcase its capabilities for the Nuclear Sector attendees, with:

• Neil Ketchell, Technical Director, discussing ESR’s safety and risk management services
• Hugues Renondeau and Raghbir Chand, discussing ESR’s full engineering capabilities comprising industrial and vacuum tribology (the science and engineering of friction, wear and lubrication), materials engineering combined with design, analysis, assembly and testing for development and independent validation, as well as the transferrable NDT (Non-Destructive Testing) expertise from ESR’s HOIS program for Oil & Gas sector.
• Hugues Renondeau also presented a collaborative advanced Tribology R&D project, shown here , on the effect of the gas environment used in Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGRs) on the wear of fuel element tie-bars and guide tube components. The paper was based on the results of extensive representative development testing undertaken at ESR Technology’s National Centre of Tribology.
• The NCT Team designed, commissioned and operated the bespoke test facility and provided consultancy and advice on the Tribological performance of the safety critical components, having reproduced the wear characteristics exhibited in operation.