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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.
A. Melintescu, D. Galeriu, S. Diabaté, S. Strack
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 3 | April 2015 | Pages 479-482
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | dx.doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T59
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Some nuclear facilities have large tritium loads and subsequent environmental emissions and consequently, the radiological impact assessment is mandatory. In case of the unplanned (potential) accidents there are extremely large uncertainties of the model predictions for crop contamination and dose due to many factors affecting the Organically Bound Tritium (OBT) dynamics in crops. A full mechanistic model is difficult to develop due to the complexity of the processes involved in tritium transfer and the environmental conditions. The preparatory steps for a robust model are discussed in the present study, considering the role of the dry matter and photosynthesis contributing to the OBT dynamics in crops.
