Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program: Advanced Instrumentation, Information, and Control Systems Technologies Technical Program Plan for 2013
Reliable instrumentation, information, and control (II&C) systems technologies are essential to ensuring safe and efficient operation of the U.S. light water reactor (LWR) fleet. These technologies affect every aspect of nuclear power plant (NPP) and balance-of-plant operations. In 1997, the National Research Council conducted a study concerning the challenges involved in modernizing existing analog-based instrumentation and controls with digital instrumentation and control systems in NPPs. Their findings identified the need for new II&C technology integration. The objective of these efforts is to develop, demonstrate, and support deployment of new digital II&C technologies for nuclear process control, enhance worker performance, and provide enhanced monitoring capabilities to ensure the continued safe, reliable, and economic operation of the nation’s NPPs. Digital II&C technologies are deployed in a number of power generation settings worldwide. Current instrumentation and human-machine interfaces in the nuclear power sector employ analog technologies. In other power generation sectors, analog technologies have largely been replaced with digital technologies. This is in part due to the manufacturing and product support base transitioning to these newer technologies. It also accompanies the transition of education curricula for I&C engineers to digital technologies. Consequently, product manufacturers refer to analog I&C as having reached the end of its useful service life. Although considered obsolete by other industries, analog I&C continues to function reliably, though spare and replacement parts are becoming increasingly scarce as is the workforce that is familiar with and able to maintain it. Analog I&C was also the predominant means used for process control in an era when human labor was more affordable, and maintaining an I&C technology base through a larger workforce conducting frequent rounds for surveillances, inspections, and tests was accepted in the nuclear power generation business model. Today’s power generation business climate is much different and II&C technologies are needed in the long run that are more highly automated and require less cost to operate and maintain, are as highly reliable as those used today, and will be familiar to a future work force. They should also enable performance gains for the utility so that they are not merely a sunken cost, as this would weigh heavily on the balance sheet at a time of particularly high cost competitiveness in electricity markets.