Nuclear Power Plant Decommissioning
6/1/2020
When a nuclear power plant reaches end-of-life, there is still a massive effort needed to fully decommission the plant. The nuclear material is still dangerous and must be handled with specific protocols, so it doesn’t become a public health hazard. It is a long and complicated process to get the material from the containment chamber to a transfer facility for packaging. The packaged material must then be moved from the transfer facility to its final storage area where the material can fully decay. To ensure a smooth and safe process, high quality wireless communications are needed between the workers who are ferrying the spent material from the containment chamber to the final storage area.
Application Notes
There are a lot of moving parts and people in the decommissioning process. A FreeSpeak II Base II base station is positioned in a central area of the plant. Splitters are connected to the base station with fiber and then positioned close to coverage points. Transceivers are then clustered around the area where communications coverage is needed. The specific positioning of the splitters and transceivers provides workers with the ability to move with nuclear material during transfer. A given worker can communicate with any other worker over multiple channels provided through the FreeSpeak beltpack and a single ear CC-110 headset.
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