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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.
M. X. Navarro, R. R. Delgado, M. G. Lagally, G. L. Kulcinski, J. F. Santarius
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 4 | November 2017 | Pages 713-718
Technical Note | dx.doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1350481
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This technical note describes the use of graphene as a way to protect plasma facing components from erosion, sputtering and diminished plasma performance and to extend component lifetimes in experimental plasma devices. In this work, 30 keV ionized helium is used as a projectile on graphene covered tungsten over a range of fluences. Graphene’s vacancy yield (ID) and natural resonance (IG) are found at ~1350 cm−1 and ~1550 cm−1, respectively. Damage of each sample is quantified using the ID/IG ratio via Raman spectroscopy (RS) at the aforementioned wave numbers. The surface morphology is studied using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and the mass losses are recorded using a high-precision scale. The results from this study are of considerable importance since they indicate that a graphene coating could be an effective candidate for reducing erosion in different PFC materials.
