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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.
R.J. Thome, R.D. Pillsbury, Jr., W.R. Mann
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 453-458
Blanket and First Wall Engineering | dx.doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22905
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The rapid decay of magnetic flux during a plasma disruption induces voltages, currents, and Lorentz loadings in nearby electrically-conducting material. Present designs employ toroidal shells or shell segments near the plasma. These shells are divided into sectors for assembly and maintenance considerations, but may have toroidally-continuous conducting paths due to the need for vacuum boundaries. Voltages induced across sector gaps may initiate arcing and subsequent material damage. In addition, induced eddy currents in the shells can interact with the toroidal field and generate large net torques on a sector. A finite element model was used to estimate the induced sector gap voltages and net overturning moments following a 10 ms disruption. The number of shells, toroidal continuity, resistivity, and shell thicknesses were varied. Results are presented that show the effects of these changes on the sector gap voltages and induced loads.
