By John Stang
Since a COVID-19 outbreak during a reactor outage in May, social distancing and wearing masks to slow the spread of the disease have cut down on colds and other communicable illnesses among temporary workers used for reactor maintenance, an industry expert said this week.
”We’ve seen a much healthier population on an overall basis,” Zach Smith, senior project manager for emergency preparedness for the Nuclear Energy Institute, said during a virtual gathering hosted Wednesday by the Energy Facilities Contractors Group. Smith works for Exelon Nuclear and is on loan to the Nuclear Energy Institute for a two-year stint that started in February.
During his presentation, Smith discussed the well-publicized COVID-19 outbreak in May at Washington DTE Energy’s Fermi No. 2 reactor in Newport, Michigan. Almost 250 outage-maintenance workers caught a case of the viral disease, delaying the maintenance work by 45 days. There are two Fermi reactors, but only one is shut down at a time for maintenance.
Reactors are routinely shut down every one to two years for massive routine maintenance that bring roughly 1,000 temporary workers to a site — a normally crowded situation that can become especially dangerous with COVID-19 in the mix. Such outages usually last 20 to 35 days, Smith said.
Checking identifications and temperature checks at the entrances to a reactor site creates choke points where the temporary workers would naturally bunch up. “Processing over 1,000 people in a small space … these are not designed for a pandemic situation,” Smith said.
So, reactor owners and operators have sometimes used larger facilities nearby as more socially distanced way stations for people entering the site. In addition, workers are sometimes required to take their breaks and spend their downtime in their own cars. Other common outage practices have to be changed, Smith said. For example, carpools and sharing hotel rooms are often now discouraged.
Maintenance outages are not the only dangerous activities due to COVID. Security training has been greatly affected.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has responded to 217 COVID-related requests for license changes. These include 167 exemptions, most related to security training and managing onsite work hours. These can be permanent or temporary exemptions.
Another 31 responses addressed requests for actual amendments to a reactor’s technical specifications and/or or operating license. Twelve responses addressed requests for relief from the applicable American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ codes, with the most common requests tackling inspection and testing requirements.
The NRC has granted numerous exemptions to reactor corporations conducting full-fledged security drills and training because of concerns about social distancing during various exercises. That includes 13 such exemptions granted in the past few weeks to allow facilities some slack in fully staffing mandatory security exercises.
