Inside NIRMA Fall 2020

What Refueling a
Nuclear Reactor
During COVID-19
Taught the
Industry
As the coronavirus pandemic
continues, we’ve all had to adapt.
Increasingly, the health crisis highlights
how essential electricity is to our daily
lives—from remote work to family
Zoom calls.
America’s 94 nuclear plants have also
adjusted to these new circumstances
and have continued to provide reliable,
carbon-free energy to keep the
electricity flowing. This was especially
evident during the spring when COVID
-19 brought new challenges to the
seasonal effort to refuel 30 nuclear
reactors across the country. This fall,
the nuclear industry will take valuable
lessons learned from that success as it
prepares to refuel another two dozen
reactors.
What the Industry Learned
Safety is the highest priority of every
U.S. nuclear plant and there were no
exceptions last spring as the nuclear
energy industry worked to minimize the
spread of coronavirus during refueling
outages.
Nuclear plants employ hundreds of
workers and during a refueling outage,
they bring in hundreds more people for
maintenance and inspections. A nuclear
plant is mostly a hands-on workplace,
but innovative nuclear service
companies were able to use new
tools so some activities could be done
remotely. For workers who still need to
go on-site, the industry has changed its
approach to scheduling duty shifts for
certain plant personnel, keeping some
of them together consistently in teams
to reduce the opportunities for virus
transmission.
Many nuclear plants also worked with
regulators to find changes in procedure
to reduce the opportunities for
infection, like postponing some annual
medical exams or security guard
weapons range activities as well as other
lower priority maintenance activities.
In addition to those broad efforts,
plants were able to take on smaller—
though no less effective—changes.
These included decontaminating the
buttons and switches in control rooms,
extensive sanitizing of other
workplaces, being ahead of the curve in
marking the floors at six-foot intervals
for social distancing, and requiring
social distancing, mask-wearing and
handwashing on-site, as well as
encouraging the same practices outside
of the workplace. Some plants even
supplied employees with meals and
groceries for their homes to help
minimize the time that they needed to
be in public areas.
What the Industry Is Still Doing
As we’ve seen, the days of COVID-
19 have required extra equipment, extra
precautions and an added sense of
responsibility beyond just yourself. This
is true when wearing a mask in public or
assuring a reliable electricity supply.
Nuclear operators have always been
adept at working together across the
industry; during the pandemic, this was
even more valuable. Plants knew how to
screen people at the plant gate for
warning signs, like a fever or cough, or
report if someone was sick at home. But
they improved on that and learned to
share this information across the
industry.
The industry has also continued to
think ahead; it’s part of why nuclear
energy is prepared for any emergency.
Plants have had pandemic response
plans since 2006 and updated them
early this year before the virus first
surged in the U.S. These plans included
measures we consider standard today
such as using protective equipment like
masks, and exercising social distancing.
Because of the possibility of
hurricanes or other extreme weather,
nuclear plants are also prepared to keep
crews in the plants if necessary, with
housing, food and other necessities, so
that their vital work can continue, a
precaution that could be used in a
pandemic. Additionally, plants have also
continued to identify people who could
fill critical roles if others fall ill, and to
exchange information and pool insights
with reactor operators around the
world.
What’s Next
The novel coronavirus has defied
almost everyone’s ability to predict, but
there’s one thing we can be assured of:
Electricity will be essential to the
recovery we all seek.
As certain plants look to refuel their
reactors this season, the industry is
looking ahead as always to keep the
lights on with reliable, carbon-free
energy. With the lessons learned from
operating during a pandemic and with
the industry’s culture of preparedness,
nuclear energy is ready for the next set
of refueling outages.
Article reprinted with permission
of NEI. Read full article here.
24 Fall 2020 NIRMA.org Inside NIRMA