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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.
J. Guasp, F. Castejón, I. Pastor, R. F. Álvarez-Estrada
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 2 | August 2017 | Pages 99-119
Technical Paper | dx.doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1320497
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The inverse problem for Thomson scattering (TS), that is, finding the electron distribution function (EDF), not restricted to be Maxwellian or isotropic, from the observation of the scattered spectrum, is addressed. Based on previous results by the authors, a new parallel FORTRAN code, INVERT, has been developed that allows to estimate the free parameters of a wide class of distribution functions by fitting experimental or numerical (synthetic) spectra using a variant of the simplex method. The application of these techniques to the extraction of non-Maxwellian or anisotropic features in the electron distribution function is analyzed in detail. The performance of the new code on noisy synthetic spectra and its capabilities to quantitatively discriminate among several competing EDFs modeling data are discussed. The issues of uniqueness (or nonuniqueness) of the inverse problem in case of multiparameter distribution functions are discussed. In such cases, the prospects of multiple diagnostics synthesis, or having several simultaneous scattering chords to remove the ambiguity in the reconstruction of the EDF, are also discussed. Some comments on the requirements of a TS system able to detect nonthermal or anisotropic effects are also included.
