Oconee-3's containment painting project

摘要

Late last year, Duke Energy's Oconee nuclear plant completed a project to recoat a portion of the carbon steel plates that line the dome of Unit 3's containment building. An Oconee team planned the project to fit within a 25-day window during a refueling outage. The recoating job, done in a radiologically contaminated environment and at 187 feet above ground level, involved grinding off layers of old paint and applying new layers of primer and epoxy paint. To access the containment dome, a temporary scaffold was built in an area above the polar crane. The scaffold was supported by a gridwork of 8-inch steel I-beams called the spray header steel. To ensure that the job would be done safely, workers first practiced on scaffolding built outside the containment building using a mockup of liner plates to test the paint abatement and recoating tasks. The recoating project was necessary because the existing coating system-made up of 35-year-old primer and paint-was failing. Paint chips were flaking off the liner plates, causing some plant op-erability concerns.