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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.
Bin Zhang, Shi Li, Sheng Zhang, Yebin Chen, Liqun Hu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 1 | July 2017 | Pages 91-98
Technical Note | dx.doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1319717
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Radial X-ray camera (RXC) is a diagnostic for the ITER tokamak. During baking and operation of ITER, the detector environment temperature will be up to 240°C, whereas the detectors must be kept below 70°C. Therefore, cooling of the detectors mounted in the camera is critical and necessary. In order to verify the effect of gas cooling for RXC detectors, a relevant test has been designed. Since the outcome of this test will be the supply of the RXC cooling system, the ITER Instrument and Control strategy was selected. Therefore, a Data Acquisition (DAQ) system was developed based on the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) framework, which implements functions for real-time data acquisition, temperature control, supervision, and archiving. Moreover, it is easy to configure control information according to user requirements. Also, some linear devices were used in the reconfiguration of EPICS. This technical note presents the entire architecture of the DAQ system and the details on the design of EPICS. The system has been implemented, and has provided reliable data for the experiment.
