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Refueling a reactor at North Anna plant is a big job, made even bigger when a generator is replaced Date published: 10/1/2008
By RUSTY DENNEN Inside North Anna Power Station, technicians remotely monitor the activities of workers wearing white protective suits in what looks like an enormous equipment-filled cave. A crew works inside the reinforced-concrete dome, or containment area, that houses Unit 2's nuclear reactor on Lake Anna in Louisa County. Except for certain times such as this, it's off-limits to workers. Peering at a bank of video screens, Trey Perrin and Mark Detrick keep track of those in the vicinity of the reactor and other radiation sources. The scene is but one dimension of refueling--a routine but critical task at North Anna and the rest of the nation's 104 commercial nuclear power plants. Like the family car, nuclear reactors must be refueled. Every nine months, one of North Anna's two 921-megawatt reactors is shut down for that purpose, while other maintenance and repairs are done. Unit 2's outage began Sept. 15, and the refueling process won't be completed until mid-October. This refueling is all the more complicated because a massive generator is also being replaced on Unit 2, which began operation in 1980. ORCHESTRATED EFFORT Eric Hendrixson, the plant's director of station safety and licensing, says refueling has changed little since the first reactor went online here in 1978, but that technology is making it faster and more efficient. "You still need to refuel; physics is physics," Hendrixson said. "Rotating equipment still wears out" The refueling and generator project will take the same amount of time as a typical refueling. "It's well-planned and orchestrated. It's not something we wake up one morning and say, 'Hey, let's have a refueling outage,'" he said. "You're laying out large pieces of it, saying, 'OK, we're replacing a generator or turbine, or upgrading components, and we slowly work our way through." The outage is a window of opportunity for equipment maintenance and testing that can't be done when the reactor is running. For each refueling, "We bring in anywhere from 1,000 to 1,200 supplemental contract employees"--mechanics, electricians, welders, scaffold builders, for example--who do specialized work, he said. Many travel from one refueling to another throughout the country. That's in addition to about 850 employees who typically work at North Anna.
Date published: 10/1/2008
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