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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.
Florian Priester, Marco Röllig
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 3 | April 2015 | Pages 539-542
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | dx.doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T74
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Turbomolecular pumps (TMP) will be used with large amounts of tritium in future fusion machines like ITER, DEMO and in the KATRIN Experiment. In the work presented, a stress test of a Leybold® MAG W2800 with a tritium throughput of 1.1 kg over 384 days of operation was performed at TLK. After this, the pump was dismantled and the tritium uptake in several parts was determined. Especially the non-metallic parts of the pump absorb large amounts of tritium and are most likely responsible for the observed pollution of the process gas. The total tritium uptake of the TMP was estimated with 0.1-1.1 TBq. No radiation-induced damages were found on the inner parts of the pump. The TMP showed no signs of functional limitations during the 384 days of operation.
