Nuclear Plant Ice Condenser Work Lights
Posted by Cam Abernethy on
We had a nuclear plant customer ask if we can make a smaller LED Stick Light for their ice condenser work they were performing during their outage.
The ice condenser is a large structure that is around the base of the reactor containment building. (Cutaway shown below.) It is divided into 24 bays. Each bay has two hinged inlet doors in the bottom of the wall between the ice condenser and the reactor containment building. Each bay contains 81 large baskets filled with ice (each 12 inches diameter x 48 feet tall) totaling about two million pounds of ice.
(Photo Credit: DC Cook)
The “Ice Crew” removes the ice to perform inspections on equipment like the doors, etc. This is a very manually intensive process that requires baskets, pulleys, ropes, and work lighting. The work lights they were using were designed for airplane inspections which met their requirements of a small diameter light to fit inside tight spaces such as in the lattice frame and ice basket columns. These lights would easily break (probably why they are out of business now) and created potential safety issues with working in low light conditions and slowed their work progress.
One of the workers in the ice crew knew about our LED Stick Lights from working on the steam generator nozzle dam crew. The nozzle dam crew typically uses our larger 4 foot model since it provides the most light in a very durable compact enclosure but the ice crew needed a smaller version of this light.
We took our proven virtually unbreakable design and scaled it down to 13” long and fit everything into a 1-1/2” heavy duty tube housing. It provides over 2,000 lumens in a 360 degree area and comes with optional cable lengths of 25, 60, and 100 feet. The cable is attached to the end of the light which makes it a perfect vertical drop light to fit into those tight inspection areas from above.