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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.
Roald A. Wigeland, Theodore H. Bauer, Thomas H. Fanning, Edgar E. Morris
Nuclear Technology | Volume 154 | Number 1 | April 2006 | Pages 95-106
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | dx.doi.org/10.13182/NT06-3
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes the results of a study that uses the thermal performance of the repository to establish chemical separations and transmutation criteria for commercial spent nuclear fuel of benefit to a geologic repository, as measured by the allowable increase in utilization of repository space. The method for determining the chemical elements to be separated is based on the thermal performance of the repository. The important chemical elements are identified, the order of importance of the separated elements is established, and the relationship between the efficiency of the chemical separation and the resulting increase in utilization is determined. The proposed repository at Yucca Mountain is used as an example of a geologic repository for the purposes of illustrating the magnitude of the benefits that are possible and the implications for repository size and operation. This work is being done in support of the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative, where numerous reactor, processing, and recycling strategies are being examined to determine the impact on issues important to the viability of nuclear electricity generation, including the disposal of spent nuclear fuel and nuclear waste.
