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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. Yuan, W. W. Fan, Y. F. Zhao, Z. H. Liu, J. Cao, G. L. Yuan, Z. J. Yin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 2 | August 2017 | Pages 129-136
Technical Paper | dx.doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1320498
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A set of real-time tomographic systems for tokamak plasma hard X-ray (HXR) diagnosis was designed, which is dedicated to real-time investigation of X-ray energy and its density profile that are produced by fast electron bremsstrahlung emission between the energy span of 20 to 200 keV under the lower hybrid (LH)–driven mode of HL-2A device. By utilizing an integrated detector array of lutetium yttrium oxyorthosilicate scintillators and silicon photomultipliers, and in conjunction with high-speed main electronics and appropriate digital processing algorithms, this tomographic system has achieved real-time energy surveillance of HXR that are radiated from 12 different chords on the poloidal plane of the HL-2A plasma region. The temporal and spatial resolutions of this system are 10 ms and 2 cm, respectively. The real-time tomography of the investigation results can clearly display the spatial distribution and its evolution over time of HXR energy. Onsite HL-2A experiments have proven that this real-time tomographic system is qualified as a reliable platform in the research field of plasma state and high-energy particles energy during LH current mode.
