New tooling at Russia's Rostov NPP cuts filter maintenance time to two days

On August 28, local time, Russia's Rostov Nuclear Power Plant announced that its engineering and technical personnel have developed and put into operation a set of specialized tooling for the maintenance of filters in the ball-type pre-filter system (SShO) of the turbine hall, significantly reducing the time required for equipment maintenance preparation and overhaul.

Rostov NPP is part of Rosenergoatom, the electric power division of Russia's State Atomic Energy Corporation (Rosatom). The filters targeted by this improvement weigh over one ton each and require crane assistance for movement, but the existing fixed cranes on site cannot directly cover the equipment locations. To address this issue, the maintenance preparation and implementation department proposed an improvement plan and designed tooling capable of moving SShO filters to areas convenient for maintenance.

Dmitry Bazhutin, chief engineer of the maintenance preparation and implementation department and one of the authors of the improvement, said that with the new tooling, the preparation time before moving equipment to the maintenance area has been reduced from 7 days to 2 hours, and the number of workers required has been cut from 6 to 2. As a result of the significantly compressed preliminary preparation, the SShO filter maintenance cycle has been shortened from 10 days to 2 days.

The proposal was recognized as the best in the "Improving Occupational Safety Levels" category during the first stage of the annual industry improvement proposal and Rosatom Production System project competition. Since 2026, Rostov NPP has implemented 690 improvement proposals and 26 production system projects. Among them, Alexander Zubov, shift supervisor of the nuclear power units, submitted 111 improvement proposals, making him the most active proposal submitter at the plant.

Sergey Fidiy, head of the Production System Development Department at Rostov NPP, stated that the outstanding improvement proposals selected in the first stage of this year's competition mainly focus on resource utilization efficiency, reducing labor intensity of processes, and improving occupational safety levels; the outstanding production system projects are oriented toward simplifying processes, increasing labor productivity, and optimizing costs. The first-place winners in each category will represent Rostov NPP in the next stage of the competition at the Rosenergoatom level.

The Rosatom Production System (PSR) is its lean production and continuous improvement mechanism. Since its launch at Rostov NPP in 2009, the plant has implemented approximately 450 production system projects. Since 2019, Rostov NPP has held the title of "PSR Leader" and has been listed as a "Digital PSR Enterprise" over the past two years.

Rostov NPP is located on the shore of the Tsimlyansk Reservoir and operates four VVER-1000 nuclear power units. Each unit generates approximately 25 million kWh of electricity per day. The plant's nuclear power accounts for more than 70% of the electricity production structure in the Rostov region and approximately 30% of the unified power system of southern Russia.