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I retired, or so I thought. Hmm, semi-retirement maybe?

Worked an outage a year ago, came home hurting, barely able to walk so...

Screw it I'm done.

Pass one 1 year, the phone call comes, here I go again. Didn't want to, but my friend/boss practically begged me to return, they can't find qualified workers. 41 openings, 34 filled, just in my dept, site wide same story.

Something about a race horse and a starting gate? (or stupid ass pride?)

I know some here used to work nukes.

Gotta say, it is ALL different now given Poo-tins invasion. You would not believe security increases and no, I will not discuss here.

Well, that's about it. No work on the KZ's for awhile.

All this pales to what's going on in Ukraine, Слава Україні!,!

 

Good for you!  Maybe the extra money will come in handy for buying bike parts, or even buying another bike.

13 years retired from PNGS (Pickering Nuclear Generating Station) . I keep tabs on some of the guys still there. PNGS is to be decommissioned in about 2 years and they are starving for Supervisors right now. No one will put their name in the hat because all the staff at PNGS want to migrate to DNGS (Darlington Nuclear Generating Station, a newer station by 15 years) which is about 35 miles down the road from PNGS. To get there, they will have to bump junior union staff and they fear that if they step up and take supervisors positions, they will not be able to bump junior staff. Senior supervisors are retiring in droves at the moment leaving behind major openings. A big mistake back in 1990 happened when the station was at complement staffing levels and there was no hiring for 11 years so there's a big hole in the seniority between 30 year seniority and 20 year seniority members. And you can't just go and hire Supervisors off of the street. I had 703 training course credits before leaving 13 years ago. 

What factors make it necessary to decommission a nuclear power plant? 

biltonjim post=30163 userid=149What factors make it necessary to decommission a nuclear power plant? 

You can rebuild almost everything in the plant except the nuclear reactor. We've retubed the reactors but the calandria surrounding the reactor tubes can be repaired to a point and then would need to be replaced. which is an impossible task. You would literally have to remove the cap on the reactor building to lift out the calandria. The reactor building is roughly 200 ft in diameter and the walls and cap are 3ft thick concrete.

My understanding as it was put to me, the Canadian model is to remove all the fuel from the reactors and transport to a facility for monitoring/storage, and then disassemble the plant and literally remove it from the face of the earth. That's an enormous task to remove 8 nuclear reactors that are 540 Mw size. Then what do you replace 8 x 540 Mw= 4320 Mw with. The wind turbines we have up here are 8Mw each, so in theory if the wind blew at 8mph 24 hours a day, 540 wind turbines could replace the output of PNGS. The problem is that the wind is unpredictable, Build more turbines and store excess energy? Maybe if every house/business had lithium storage and stored energy individually but that would take a mammoth rethinking in operating a power grid.

Another plan was to build 8 new reactor buildings on the Pickering site and pipe the steam to the existing turbine hall and feed the 8 turbine generators. I think for political reasons, this plan was discounted.
It's an interesting problem. Ontario has 3 nuclear power stations - Pickering, Darlington and Bruce Power. Darlington and Bruce Power operate on a 500 KV grid while the Pickering plant operates on a 230 KV grid suppling power to the "Golden Horseshoe" which is the older original power grid surrounding Lake Ontario. You can't just turn off the switch and not replace the supply and to be honest, I haven't followed or looked in to the "plan" All i know is that my buddy of 50 years who also works at Pickering as a Outage Manager has told me about the life expectancy of the plant and how the unionized employees are strategically positioning themselves for the eventual.

Russia has a unique way of de-commissioning Nuke Plants !