Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
7/18/2014
Westinghouse Electric Company has successfully installed its new spent fuel pool level instrumentation system at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar nuclear plant, the company announced this week. Westinghouse developed the technology in response to regulations issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission following the disaster at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear station, in which a leak in the spent fuel pool resulted in a fire and further spread of contamination. “Declaration of the Westinghouse spent fuel pool instrumentation system as functional at Watts Bar represents a significant milestone for Westinghouse and the nuclear energy industry,” David Howell, senior vice president of Westinghouse’s Automation and Field Services, said in a statement. “This is one of the first Westinghouse post-Fukushima modifications to be installed and operational at a U.S. nuclear power plant. We look forward to supporting Westinghouse customers in meeting regulatory requirements through similar such installations, helping to ensure the continued safe, efficient and economic production of electricity.”
The technology uses a guided wave radar sensor to monitor the pool levels. According to the company, in the event of an emergency that causes an extended loss of AC power at a plant, the instrumentation system provides plant operators a way to monitor the water level in the pool to verify that the used fuel remains covered by water and appropriately cooled—something that could not be done at Fukushima. Westinghouse also said that it has contracts to deliver more than 90 other pool instrumentation system at plants across the United States, although they are at various stages of installation and testing. The installation of this system is one step in plants’ implementation of lessons-learned from Fukushima. The NRC required stations to implement mitigation strategies to maintain cooling pools in the face of an emergency or blackout for an extended time as well as requiring seismic and flood re-evaluations, among other things.
