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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.
M. S. Tillack, X. R. Wang, D. Navaei, H. H. Toudeshki, A. F. Rowcliffe, F. Najmabadi, ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 1 | January 2015 | Pages 49-74
Technical Paper | dx.doi.org/10.13182/FST14-790
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
ARIES-ACT1 is the latest in a series of tokamak power plant designs that capitalize on the high-temperature capabilities and attractive safety and environmental characteristics of SiC composites coupled with a self-cooled lead-lithium breeder. This combination offers both design simplicity and high performance, capable of operating at very high coolant outlet temperature in a moderately high-power-density device. Blankets are supported within a poloidally continuous He-cooled steel structural ring, which adds robustness and minimizes loads on the SiC modules. In order to withstand high local surface heat flux in the divertor (of the order of 14 MW/m2 time averaged), a helium-cooled tungsten-alloy divertor was adopted. About 25% of the total “high-grade” heat is thus removed by helium, to be combined with the blanket heat in order to feed the power cycle. In addition to the in-vessel power-producing elements of the design, this paper also summarizes the key features and analysis of the vacuum vessel and power conversion system.
