Operations
The Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station achieved record levels of availability with a 10-year average of 93.11% and generated over 5,000 GWh/year of energy on a sustained basis for its first decade of operations. However, numerous problems started to surface in the mid to late 1990s, due to poor maintenance and low investment. In mid-January 1997, a leak in the reactor core forced a third shutdown in 2 years. The 75-day stoppage was caused by an unlocked feeder pipe. The human error cost C$40 million in repairs and C$450,000/day to purchase replacement power from Quebec.
In 1990, assistant plant operator Daniel George Maston was charged after he took a sample of heavy water from the moderator system and loaded it into a "sport mix" drink dispenser in an industrial lunch zone. It was not loaded in a water cooler in an office as had been reported. Eight employees drank some of the contaminated water. One individual who was engaged in heat stress work, requiring alternating work, rest, and re-hydration periods consumed significantly more than the others. The incident was discovered when employees began leaving bio-assay urine samples with elevated tritium levels, one with particularly unusually high levels. The quantities involved were well below levels which could induce heavy water toxicity, however, several employees received elevated radiation doses from tritium and activated chemicals in the water. It is believed that Maston intended the exposure to be a practical joke, whereby the affected employees would be required to give urine samples daily for an extended length of time.
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Famous quotes containing the word operations:
“It may seem strange that any road through such a wilderness should be passable, even in winter, when the snow is three or four feet deep, but at that season, wherever lumbering operations are actively carried on, teams are continually passing on the single track, and it becomes as smooth almost as a railway.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“You can’t have operations without screams. Pain and the knife—they’re inseparable.”
—Jean Scott Rogers. Robert Day. Mr. Blount (Frank Pettingell)