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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.
Toshiharu Takeishi, Kenji Kotoh, Yoshiya Kawabata, Jun-ichi Tanaka, Shingo Kawamura, Masayuki Iwata
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 67 | Number 3 | April 2015 | Pages 596-599
Proceedings of TRITIUM 2013 | dx.doi.org/10.13182/FST14-T88
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the decommissioning project of tritium handling laboratories or/and facilities, oils such as used in the vacuum pumps have been left conventionally in their comprehensive facilities. Existence of oils, especially highly-contaminated with tritium, is becoming one of the serious problems in projects for decommissioning tritium handling laboratories because of no disposal way of the tritiated waste oils. Experiments using bubblers were carried out to examine the tritium contamination and decontamination of a volume of rotary-vacuum-pump-oil. Contamination of pump oil was observed by bubbling with tritiated water vapor and tritiated hydrogen gas. And then, subsequent decontamination of tritiated oil was processed by bubbling with pure water vapor and dry argon gas. The bubbling with water vapor was more effective than with the dry gas. Experimental results show that the water vapor bubbling in an oil bottle can remove tritium efficiently from the contaminated oil into another water-bubbling bottle.
