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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
Tsuyoshi Hoshino, Kentaro Ochiai, Yuki Edao, Yoshinori Kawamura
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 2 | March 2015 | Pages 386-389
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | dx.doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T35
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Li2TiO3 advanced tritium breeders with excess Li (Li2+xTiO3+y) are stable in a reducing atmosphere at high temperatures. Although the tritium release properties of tritium breeders are documented in databases for DEMO blanket design, no in situ examination under fusion neutron (DT neutron) irradiation has been performed. In this study, a preliminary examination of the tritium release properties of advanced tritium breeders was performed, and DT neutron irradiation experiments were performed at the fusion neutronics source (FNS) facility in JAEA. Considering the tritium release characteristics, the optimum grain size after sintering is <5 µm. From the results of the optimization of granulation conditions, prototype Li2+xTiO3+y pebbles with optimum grain size (<5 µm) were successfully fabricated. The Li2+xTiO3+y pebbles exhibited good tritium release properties similar to the Li2TiO3 pebbles. In particular, the released amount of HT gas for easier tritium handling was higher than that of HTO water.
