How RFID tracked tool containers at France’s Fessenheim nuclear plant before its closure

At the Fessenheim nuclear power station in Alsace, dozens of large metal containers held the maintenance tools and equipment used around the site. Each one had to be accounted for. The facility operator was required to know where every container was at any moment, record every movement, and produce audit reports for internal and regulatory controls. To do that, the site tagged the containers with passive UHF RFID and read them with handheld mobile readers.

Fessenheim was France’s oldest operating nuclear power station, a Centre Nucleaire de Production d’Electricite, or CNPE, which is the standard designation for a nuclear generating site run by EDF, the French state-controlled utility. It had two 880 MW pressurised water reactors. Reactor 1 was shut down in February 2020 and reactor 2 followed at the end of June 2020, closing the plant after a political commitment first made in 2012 and repeatedly delayed.

What was installed

The container system was the NexCap Mobile Assets Management product from Nexess, an RFID systems integrator headquartered in Sophia Antipolis in southern France that specialises in the energy and aerospace sectors. Nexess builds tool-tracking around RFID cabinets, carts, counters, portals and handheld terminals tied to a single software platform, so that a tool removed from a cabinet and a container moved across a yard appear in the same record. RFID Journal has reported that EDF used Nexess systems across its French nuclear fleet.

The tags were Xerafy MICRO UHF RFID tags. Xerafy is a tag manufacturer that specialises in rugged and on-metal transponders for industrial use. The system identified and audited the storage containers, recorded movements and locations, pushed picking and put-away instructions to workers over a wireless LAN, and collected the location and status data that fed reports and regulatory filings.

Why on-metal tagging was the hard part

A passive UHF tag has no battery. It harvests its power from the reader’s signal and replies by backscattering part of that signal, which is why the surface it sits on matters so much. Metal detunes a plain label antenna and reflects the field, so a standard adhesive inlay stuck to a steel container door will often read at a few centimetres or not at all. On-metal tags solve this with a different antenna design and a built-in spacer or ground plane that uses the metal as part of the radiating structure rather than fighting it. Our RFID glossary covers the underlying terms.

Fessenheim added the physical punishment on top. The containers were moved by forklift and could be stored outdoors, so the tags had to survive shock, vibration and weather while staying readable. Xerafy’s own account of the deployment points to exactly that: the MICRO tags were chosen because they go directly onto metal and hold up to rough handling and exposure to the elements.

What the operator expected to gain

The figures attached to the project were projections made by the site, not audited results. The case study is written in the future tense and states that CNPE estimated the container tracking system would:

• Reduce the time spent looking for containers by 70%
• Reduce the time needed to prepare regulatory filings by 80%
• Improve forklift driver productivity by 60%
• Improve storage space efficiency by 50%

Treat those as the business case rather than the outcome. The case study carries no publication date, so the only firm thing that can be said about timing is that the deployment predates the June 2020 shutdown. It names SPIE Nuclear as the company involved, a reference to SPIE Nucleaire, the French contractor that provides maintenance and engineering services to nuclear sites, and describes CNPE Fessenheim as the facility that implemented NexCap. Nothing in the available material says whether the system is still running at the site today.

A tracking problem that outlives the plant

That last point is less academic than it sounds. Dismantling Fessenheim was approved by decree and runs in four stages: dismantling, sanitation of structures and floors, demolition of buildings to at least a metre deep, and site rehabilitation. Full dismantling is not expected to finish before 2040 at the earliest, and EDF plans to reconvert part of the site into a low-radioactivity metal recycling plant intended to open in 2031. Staffing has collapsed in the meantime, from roughly 750 plant employees plus 300 service providers in 2017 to around 60 EDF staff needed for dismantling work up to 2024.

Decommissioning is itself a material accountability exercise. Tools, containers and equipment still have to be located, their movements logged and their status reported, with far fewer people available to walk the site and look. That is the same workload the RFID system was bought to carry. The wider nuclear sector has been working the same seam from the other end, as with the ARG-US active RFID work on nuclear material packages, and large maintenance estates such as the US Navy’s shipyard asset tracking programme are tagging for the same reason: the audit trail is worth more than the search time.

Read more at https://xerafy.com/post/how-spie-nuclear-cuts-tool-tracking-time-by-70-percent/