General

Ensuring safety at Fort Calhoun Station

Braden Barnes and Jill Ryan were looking for that proverbial foot in the door with OPPD.

Barnes was a small-town cop; Ryan was a stay-at-home mom.

They both found homes at OPPD, working in the utility’s radiation protection department. Barnes was hired 20 years ago, and Ryan was hired eight years after him.

They’ve seen many changes as OPPD’s Fort Calhoun Station (FCS) undergoes decommissioning.

“I loved it right away, and I still love it now,” said Barnes, a senior radiation protection technician. “The role keeps changing (with the plant’s decommissioning), but plenty of work remains.”

What hasn’t changed is that they work each day to keep employees, the public and the environment safe from radiological exposure.

Busy place

The decommissioning of FCS continues, as crews and contractors work together to safely return the site to greenfield status sometime in 2026. Greenfield status means virtually no trace of the plant will remain. The plant closed in 2016 for economic reasons.

This year, much of the crews’ work revolves around removing equipment associated with the nuclear reactor that powered the site for more than 40 years.

The major projects set for completion this year are removing the two steam generators, the main reactor cooling pumps, and the plant’s pressurizer, which kept water from boiling while the plant was operating.

Radiation protection

Much of Ryan’s work this spring centers on dismantling and rebuilding the radiation detection machines people must pass through and be scanned by.  Those scanning machines will be set up in different areas where work is being done.

Gamma radiation is “high-energy, short-wavelength electromagnetic radiation emitted from the nucleus of an atom. Gamma radiation frequently accompanies emissions of alpha particles and beta particles and always accompanies fission” or the splitting of an atom, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

The monitors Ryan is disassembling and reassembling are in the Radiologically Controlled Area (RCA), primarily the auxiliary building, among other sites. The auxiliary building was by the reactor building. It housed many safety systems associated with the reactor, like radioactive waste systems, chemical and volume control systems, and emergency cooling water systems.

Ryan and other crew members  will set the monitors up near RCAs where crews work to disassemble components from the generators and other equipment, process radiological waste, and continue to demo containment’s internals.

She will be busy with that project for the next couple of months.

Joining the team

Ryan, a health physicist at FCS, has been at OPPD since 2012. She started as a janitor working for a contractor at the plant. Her mother-in-law worked at OPPD and encouraged Ryan to apply for the job.

Ryan previously worked as a radiation protection technician. She still does some of those same tasks but can also work on equipment and perform other duties, like calculating internal and external radiation dose levels and radiological instrumentation.

While working for the contractor, she met many people from different areas at the utility. After a few months, she talked to one of the lead technicians from Radiation Protection, who asked if she’d thought about working in the department. OPPD hired her for a role in radiation protection, and she worked her way up from there. She said she still loves working at OPPD.

Barnes, who has been at OPPD for 20 years, started his career in security after leaving the Valley Police Department, a job he took after a stint in the Army. A friend on the police force told Barnes to specifically look at OPPD’s security department as a great career option.

Nature of the job

Barnes and Ryan earned accreditation through the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. OPPD had an accredited training program through the academy where employees could train and take classes to earn the needed qualifications to work in some secured regions in nuclear plants, said Dan Whisler, manager of Radiation Protection and Chemistry at FCS.

Their work is similar, but Ryan can diagnose, fix and calibrate various instruments. Both had to take Department of Energy (DOE) math, physics and chemistry courses and meet DOE requirements. They also went through systems training, such as how the turbines work.

“(Radiation protection techs) are here 24/7, so if something goes wrong, we investigate, mitigate and control the situation for up to two hours before anyone else gets involved,” Barnes said. “When we get the phone call, it’s up to us to notify command central, see what is happening, and try to fix it as best we can.”

Techs thoroughly check the trucks at FCS that carry radioactive waste to the rail cars that ship the waste out. That includes the driver and passengers. They clean any contamination found.

Techs also check the rail cars for radioactive contamination. They use telepoles with Geiger-Mueller counters – devices that detect radiation – to check beneath rail cars and trucks for radiation and contamination, Barnes said.

When FCS has visitors, whether nuclear regulators, OPPD’s senior management members, or other groups, the radiation techs are the ones who brief the escorts and visitors, help facilitate the tours, answer visitors’ questions, and ensure everyone stays safe, Barnes said.

“Our main focus is to protect the workers, the public and the environment from occupational radiation exposure,” Barnes said.

Testing for radiation

Radiation techs also survey areas where decommissioning work is ongoing so they know the radiation and contamination levels before work begins. Those surveys also lets workers know which areas of their workspace have the least radiation exposure, which can help with positioning while working.

Barnes sees areas like the reactor vessel previously only seen in training manuals.

“When the plant was running, we spent very little time in containment except for taking critical samples and some surveying work during shut down or start up (of the reactor), just because of the radiological conditions,” said Barnes, who is working toward his bachelor’s degree in sustainability management and hopes to stay with OPPD after decommissioning is finished. He job shadowed in OPPD’s Corporate Security department and supported the metering boot camp as an EMT, and he’s looking for more exposure to other areas of OPPD outside of FCS.

When crews cut up the internal vessel components underwater inside the reactor vessel in 2022, techs performed underwater surveying and managed water chemistry to protect the workers from risks, Barnes said.

“It’s like one big outage,” Barnes said of the ongoing decommissioning work.

Like Barnes, Ryan has spent her whole OPPD career at FCS. It is hard to see her mentors retire and know the end of the decommissioning work at the plant grows closer. But like Barnes, Ryan hopes to stay at OPPD beyond decommissioning.

“I know there will be more opportunities, and I look forward to taking on new challenges,” Ryan said. “I was a stay-at-home mom for 12 years, and it blows my mind sometimes to think how far I’ve come in this industry, and this is the work I do.”