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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.
C. B. Yeamans, D. L. Bleuel
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 2 | August 2017 | Pages 120-128
Technical Paper | dx.doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1320499
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In need of a spatially resolved neutronic measurement to better understand the implosion physics of inertial-confined fusion, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) developed a distributed Flange-mounted Neutron Activation Diagnostic system (FNAD). FNAD measures primary deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion neutron fluence at 20 points surrounding the target chamber using the 90Zr(n,2n)89Zr reaction, utilizing the 12.1-MeV reaction threshold to minimize signal from spurious neutron sources. Through careful design of the measurement systematics, the relative ratios of fluence at those 20 points are measured to within 2%. This precision is sufficient to allow interpretation of the resulting neutron sky as a map of scattering mass areal density (ρR) of the cold compressed D-T fuel surrounding the nuclear burn. Controlling the shape of this fuel during assembly is essential to achieving optimal implosion performance. This paper details the system design and locational deployment, measurement techniques, and calibration procedure. It also outlines data analysis and reduction, and data presentation methods used during the National Ignition Campaign and High-Foot Campaign.
