FirstEnergy Corp.'s Davis-Besse nuclear plant is on the cover of the latest edition of Nuclear Plant Journal, an industry trade magazine founded in 1983 that comes out six times a year.
An article starting on Page 48 describes, in technical detail, how FirstEnergy verified during a recent outage "that the containment vessel had not degraded in interior regions of the containment due to refueling canal leakage at its Davis-Besse plant."
To do its test, the Akron-based utility developed a procedure that required excavation of nearly five feet of reinforced concrete "to expose the plate at a critical low elevation where water could accumulate for examination and ultrasonic thickness testing," the article's two authors John Vincent, a principal engineer at CTLGroup in Skokie, Ill., and Trent Henline, Davis-Besse site projects manager, wrote.
The task was further complicated by the potential for higher-than-normal radiation exposure to workers.
An aerial of Davis-Besse (not this photo) is on the cover. BLADE photo.
In their article, Vincent and Henline said the special inspection verified the containment vessel is still in good shape - 39 years after the plant went online in 1977 - and was done without damaging any parts. Workers were subjected only to "relatively low radiation exposures," the authors wrote.
"The procedure that was developed can be used for similar situations at other plants," the article said.
Other highlights of the latest edition of Nuclear Plant Journal include an article by U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Stephen Burns on his agency's efforts to be an effective regulator and an article by Bill Dean, the NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation director, on lessons learned from the Fukushima-Daiichi disaster of March, 2011.
In another article, William Magwood IV, director-general of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Nuclear Energy Agency, said he ironically had a 90-minute chat with Japanese delegates about preparations for seismic events hours before that country was hit by the tsunami that triggered the multiple-reactor Fukushima meltdown.
At the time, Mr. Magwood was an NRC commissioner.
The latest issue includes discussions about the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster. Photo credit: Associated Press.
"It's hard not to think back to that and remember how innocent the conversation seemed five years ago today about seismic events, and then all that has happened over the last five years, and the tragedy of the tsunami and the difficulty to deal with the aftermath of the accident at the plant," Mr. Magwood wrote. "I think that everyone in the nuclear community continues to think about all of these people, and we want to do what we can to help them, and work hard to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again anywhere in the world."
Nuclear Plant Journal has a circulation of 12,273. It is written primarily for nuclear managers and engineers across the world.
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