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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.
Seong Dae Park, Dong Won Lee, Dong Jun Kim, Seungyon Cho
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 4 | November 2017 | Pages 801-806
Technical Note | dx.doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1347467
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The helium cooled ceramic reflector (HCCR) test blanket module (TBM) has been designed to be installed in ITER and to verify the tritium production and the heat extraction in Korea. Lithium, beryllium, and graphite are used as a breeder, a neutron multiplier, and a reflector, respectively, which called as breeding zone (BZ) including cooling plate. The BZ was operated with the highest temperature in the TBM due to the nucler heating not only in breeding material but also structure. The margin to the allowable temperature for the breeder is very small in the current conceptual design of HCCR TBM. In the present study, feasible methods were investigated to lower the maximum temperature of the BZ. The thermal resistance and the effect of each factor were studied with a conventional CFD code, ANSYS-CFX v14.5. It is found that the thermal resistance related to the pebble beds layer was main factor to determine the breeder temperature, and the installation of the cooling fins could reduce the heat transfer resistance and lower the maximum temperature of breeder about 80°C.
