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Penfield and Enos: Outage planning in the COVID-19 era
Penfield
Enos
Energy Harbor’s Beaver Valley plant, located about 34 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, Pa., was one of many nuclear sites preparing for a scheduled outage as the coronavirus pandemic intensified in March. The baseline objective of any planned outage—to complete refueling on time and get back to producing power—was complicated by the need to prevent the transmission of COVID-19.
While over 200 of the plant’s 850 staff members worked from home to support the outage, about 800 contractors were brought in for jobs that could only be done on-site. Nuclear News Staff Writer Susan Gallier talked with Beaver Valley Site Vice President Rod Penfield and General Plant Manager Matt Enos about the planning and communication required.
Beaver Valley can look forward to several more outages in the future, now that plans to shut down the two Westinghouse pressurized water reactors, each rated at about 960 MWe, were reversed in March. “The deactivation announcement happened in the middle of all our planning,” Enos said. “It’s a shame we haven’t had a chance to get together as a large group and celebrate that yet.”
While the focus remains on safe pandemic operations, the site now has two causes for celebration: an outage success and a long future ahead.
D. R. Hanchar, M. S. Kazimi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 395-400
Tritium | dx.doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22896
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A transient tritium permeation model is developed based on a simplified conceptual DT-fueled fusion reactor design. The major design features in the model are a solid breeder blanket, a low pressure purge gas in the blanket and a high pressure helium primary coolant. Tritium inventory in the breeder is due to diffusive hold-up and solubility effects. Diffusive hold-up is assumed to be the dominant factor in order to separate the solution for the breeder tritium concentration. The model was applied to the STARFIRE-Interim Reference Design, whose system parameters yielded a breeder tritium inventory on the order of grams. The breeder pellets (average radius, 10−3 cm) reach their steady-state tritium content in approximately 4 hours from startup, assuming continuous full power operation. Both the steady-state breeder tritium concentration and the time to reach that steady-state are proportional to the square of the pellet radius.
