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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.
D. Demange, I. Cristescu, E. Fanghänel, M. Glugla, N. Gramlich, T.L. Le, R. Michling,H. Moosmann, W.M. Shu, K.H. Simon, R. Wagner, S. Welte, R.S Willams
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 2 | March 2015 | Pages 312-315
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | dx.doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T18
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The CAPER facility of the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe has demonstrated the technology for the tokamak exhaust processing. CAPER has been significantly upgraded to pursue R&D towards highly tritiated water (HTW) handling and processing. The preliminary tests using a metal oxide reactor producing HTW afterward detritiated with PERMCAT were successful. In a later stage, a micro-channel catalytic reactor was installed in view of long term R&D program on HTW. The integration of this new system in CAPER was carried out along with a careful safety analysis due to high risk associated with such experiments. First experiments using the μ-CCR were performed trouble free, and HTW up to 360 kCi/kg was produced at a rate of 0.5 g/h. Such HTW was collected into a platinized zeolite bed (2 g of HTW for 20 g of Pt-zeolite), and in-situ detritiation was performed via isotopic exchange with deuterium. These first experimental results with tritium confirmed the potential for the capture and exchange method to be used for HTW in ITER.
