Development of advanced technologies

Advanced technologies, (especially those involving computer-based applications) have increased productivity and efficiency in high technology industries such as the aerospace and automobile industries. The nuclear industry has also benefited from such technologies but not to the same extent, partly because the rise in use of such technologies has occurred when the nuclear industry has been in a period of stagnation with respect to new orders; the industry has seldom been able to exploit the benefits of multiple orders, and the long regulatory review process of new modifications with the associated intensive safety analyses have offset the schedule advantage of their implementation. However, advances have been made in some areas and advanced technologies must be considered an essential element of any effort to increase the competitiveness of new nuclear generation. It is to be expected that the potential application of advanced technologies to achieve profound reductions in cost and delivery in the nuclear industry will be realized in two categories: (a) the design, procurement, manufacture and construction phases of a project where it can be tied to cost reduction from improved manufacturing schedules, and (b) in the operational phase, where it will have a large effect in enhancing safety and efficiency of operation. These two categories are discussed as follows.

3.2.2.1. Design, procurement, manufacture and construction

The effective and timely execution of nuclear plant design, procurement, manufacture, construction and maintenance activities, is highly dependent upon the flow of necessary

27 information throughout the integrated project cycle, starting with design and continuing through to commissioning and operation and maintenance.

There are two challenges to be addressed. The first challenge is producing the design in the first place while maintaining configuration control. In order to drive capital costs down, the use of 3-D modelling is seen as the keystone in the process. The computer aided design process has now been used for design-related activities and is a standard feature of most design and graphics organizations. It allows the rapid exploration of design variations and modifications; the ability to see the impact of changed designs on the system layout, and in the case of modular systems, the ability to virtually see the accessibility of the module into the plant during construction or after operation.

The entire physical design of the plant should thus be rendered in a 3-D model that encompasses 100% of the detailed physical plant. In this visionary concept there are no drawings, or specifications, only the database that represents the model. All documents and graphics used to construct are “cut” from the model by area and construction trade as the plant is constructed.

The next step is to integrate the data and electronic tools (wiring and cabling, material management, equipment and document asset management) so that every piece of data exists in only one place and changes to the physical, logical and analysed plant cascade automatically through the data so that correctness and consistency are assured, thus making detailed configuration control throughout the plant life cycle feasible.

A natural extension of the 3D model is its integration with a schedule model. In this way, the implications of documentation or data changes can be easily assessed during construction.

One key to cost reduction has been reducing design and construction cycle time as shown by the automobile and aerospace industries. These industries have gone through the process of re-examining how their engineering, procurement and fabrication are accomplished and how information technology can be integrated into these processes. For example, concurrent engineering represents the potential to work a number of activities in a parallel path, thus shortening the schedule. Dramatic improvements will be possible once an understanding is established on how to take these concurrent engineering activities such as materials review and stress analyses and deal with resolving multiple revisions of the same drawing being used by multiple designers and disciplines.

The second challenge is getting the components and subassemblies designed, ordered and assembled without error. Co-ordination and communication between various organizations are needed. The Internet has now reached a high level of capability with respect to vendors supporting Web-enabled applications. This new technology can be exploited through the common application of integrated electronic concurrent engineering tools across the design to manufacturer interface, to achieve substantial reductions in the capital cost of major plant components like steam generators, reactivity mechanisms, pressurizers, pumps, etc., to enable the design and procurement cycle to be speeded up substantially.

A further natural development is the merger of supply chain management with network technology such that the reactor vendor, the architect engineer and the plant purchaser and all the various suppliers receive co-ordinated information to achieve improvements in practice.

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The co-ordinated design information on components can be delivered in appropriate form to the component vendor without the need for successive co-ordination activities.

The evaluation of the cycle times outlined above will serve to highlight the schedule impacts of the design, fabrication and construction processes, but it will also facilitate evaluation of whether changes in the plant design will also reduce capital cost.

Capital cost reduction goals need to be established for selected high capital cost systems and structures in a plant’s design. The quantitative targets of these goals can be established by (1) first reviewing the systems and structures in a plant’s design; (2) making initial judgements about what the target reduction for the individual system or structure should be;

(3) considering the relative cost significance of the system or structure; and (4) recognizing that the individual targets will need to be regularly re-evaluated and adjusted, considering changes occurring in the competing energy technologies (e.g. natural gas generated electricity), and re-adjusting the target, if necessary.

Critical reviews can evaluate how particular features impact on initial cost and schedule of typical nuclear plant designs. One could, for example, evaluate the principle that individual stand-alone units should have no shared facilities. On the one hand, this can result in unnecessary duplication of some service facilities. On the other hand, sharing of facilities can lead to safety questions of common mode failures and possible interaction between units.

Other areas to be evaluated include modularization, construction techniques, and prefab/shop assembly. Critical reviews should be performed to challenge current assumptions and requirements on plant arrangement and design, and to propose alternate safety criteria to reduce the cost of nuclear power plants for the future while assuring that safety goals are met.

New technologies should also be evaluated for their cost-reducing potential. The results of these evaluations could then be fed back into the process evaluation outlined above to determine the overall impact and produce a process guideline document. This document would then be used by all of the individuals and organizations looking for ways to significantly simplify the systems and structures to reduce capital costs. This will prevent large disparities in accomplishments from one group to another and development of conflicting design requirements.

The above tools and the associated data used during design, procurement and construction could be transferred to the operations organization in such a way that there will be no need for the costly time consuming reconfiguration of data that occurred in the past. Detailed materials, equipment, document and database configuration management in operations will simply be the continuation of the configuration management maintained throughout design, procurement and construction.

Annex 19 describes the approach taken by AECL to integrate the design, procurement and construction processes. This system is currently being used for the Qinshan project in China, and it is planned to be used for future CANDU projects.

Annex 20 describes two programmes being carried out by Westinghouse and Duke Engineering and Services to develop advanced technologies to reduce design, procurement, construction, installation and testing (DPCIT) costs. The first programme, funded by the Electric Power Research Institute, is developing a 4-D model of construction plans for the

29 System 80+ design. The second programme, funded under the USDOE’s Nuclear Energy Research Initiative, focuses on application of new technologies to reduce DPCIT costs.

3.2.2.2. Smart technologies to increase reliability and efficiency of operation

Safety is enhanced by the operational effectiveness of a well trained and conscientious work force provided with the tools that can analyse trends in component or system behaviour and diagnose situations. Such tools are predicted to result from the application of smart technologies that can monitor the health of systems and components and indicate the approach of conditions outside the design/operating envelope. In this way, high reliability can be achieved from the existence of such diagnostic capability, supporting a case for eliminating redundant equipment.

Current activities within the USDOE’s Nuclear Energy Research Initiative include a programme to design, develop and evaluate an integrated set of tools and methodologies that can improve the reliability and safety of advanced nuclear power plants through the introduction of smart equipment and predictive maintenance technology (see Annexes 17 and 20). “Smart equipment” embodies elemental components (e.g. sensors, data transmission devices, computer hardware and software) that continuously monitor the state of health of the equipment in terms of failure modes and remaining useful life, to predict degradation and potential failure and inform the users of the need for maintenance or system-level operational adjustments. The combination of smart equipment and predictive maintenance technology would provide a system-level integration of plant maintenance information and real time sensor data utilizing the self-monitoring and self-diagnostic characteristics built into the equipment. The system could be designed around a distributed software architecture that allows scale up to enterprise-wide applications and provides the ability to view real time equipment performance and safety-related data from remote locations.

Internal network technology and high speed communications will make it possible for all of the engineering, analysis, licensing and procurement functions, that may now be the responsibility of individual operating stations, to be co-ordinated by a central engineering group serving many stations. The station staff complement will be significantly reduced, but safety should be enhanced by powerful plant health monitoring systems. The use of such a system implies the existence of suitable computer system protection or “firewall” to the system.

Future web-based technology will be the vehicle by which operations and engineering staff will locate, view, understand and “navigate” the work processes that guide their day to day tasks. When the system is completed and deployed, downtime and maintenance costs will be significantly reduced.

To facilitate the introduction of such technology into new reactors, it will be necessary to have available a preliminary evaluation of the existing reactor designs and their operation to produce data on what nuclear plant equipment would most likely benefit from the addition of smart features, identified and prioritized using available maintenance data and PRA studies. It could then be shown how smart features could be applied to a specific piece of equipment.

In detail it will likely be necessary to develop a methodology for evaluating plant equipment and systems to determine an optimum health monitoring plan. Critical equipment, dominant failure modes, and dominant failure causes will need to be identified and ranked.

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Optimization analyses can then determine the most cost-effective allocation of smart features, together with an understanding of the adequacy of existing sensor technology, and where new sensor technology is needed. As mentioned above, such work should identify and use, whenever possible, existing or ongoing studies and/or analyses dealing with plant maintenance data, PRA studies, on-line component monitoring, and condition-based maintenance. On-going work in the area of condition-based maintenance, and in the area of predictive maintenance and optimal spares analysis, also form valuable inputs.

It may be necessary as a parallel exercise to develop methodologies for (1) systematically evaluating the equipment used in a nuclear plant to determine how the reliability of the equipment could be improved by the addition of more sophisticated (i.e. smart) monitoring and diagnostic features; and (2) designing plant systems that will allow communication and integration of data among the smart components, as well as the control room systems and the plant operators.

It is envisaged that an equipment maintenance reliability simulation (“virtual machine”) capa-bility will need to be developed. A recurring issue in demonstrating the benefits from smart equipment and predictive maintenance systems is the lack of documented data demonstrating the benefits. It is currently not possible to document cost savings and performance improve-ments from health monitoring systems since there are no completed plant installations currently collecting data. The lack of active installations also means that there is no test bed to help develop and test the analysis portions of a health monitoring system. For example, rules must be developed and tested for updating model data and for making “repair/do not repair”

recommendations. The parameters that control these rules need to be optimized for the equipment behaviour and the quality of starting data. For these reasons, a means of simulating equipment behaviour is required.

It will be necessary to have a “vigilance” program to identify smart technologies available from industry/government programs that can be applied to new nuclear plants and identify technology gaps for which smart technologies do not currently exist and, therefore, must be developed.

In particular, methodologies for consolidating the presentation of data obtained from smart equipment to end-users will be needed. Health monitoring systems often require the processing and analysis of enormous amounts of data. Any reduction in data handling offers benefits and savings in terms of time, resources, and cost. Thus a methodology that effectively reduces very large data sets to smaller, yet faithful representations of the original data sets will be an enormous asset. Further, a strategy for providing this information to plant operators, maintenance personnel, and plant management that integrates with existing plant Man-Machine Interface (MMI) systems and includes capabilities for success path monitoring of safety systems and the presentation of information generated from smart equipment will be necessary.

An integration of all the information to produce the “big picture” or enterprise-level view of reliability improvement in nuclear power plants is the next step. The big picture is often referred to as enterprise asset optimization, which can be simply defined as maximum asset availability and performance for the least cost. A Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) is an essential part of any reliability management program since it collects data, such as labour, materials, downtime, contract costs, symptoms, failure and action information. More advanced CMMS packages based around a workflow engine are starting to

31 be developed, and these are intended to be integrated with other plant systems such as financial, manufacturing resource planning, shop floor data collection, condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, electronic data interchange, etc. They can accumulate more data than traditional systems for reliability analysis. However, to be fully effective, reliability needs to be plugged in to the entire enterprise supply chain. These systems provide even more reliability analysis data such as production data and asset and vendor information from across the plant. Achievement of this level of integration represents a formidable challenge. To be able to perform this level of integration, it will first be necessary to develop techniques that combine “equipment health” information from individual machines into “plant health”

information. While it is obviously beneficial to perform predictive maintenance on individual pieces of equipment, the ultimate goal is to develop methodologies to combine predictive maintenance information into a plant-wide system that includes the capability to assess the impact of preventive maintenance on plant profits.

Development will be necessary to establish the methodology for systematically evaluating equipment to determine how best to improve its reliability and optimize smart equipment.

From such developments should come descriptions of how to apply smart features to a variety of equipment. At the corporate level it becomes somewhat easier also to document these benefits of integrated smart analysis, comparing the investments and costs incurred with the revenues that accrue from cost savings and performance improvements from plant health monitoring systems. From results of the above programmes, in part or in full, an estimate of the overall reliability benefits that could be expected for a typical new nuclear plant can be prepared.

In summary, advanced and smart technologies offer the tools to significantly reduce costs by streamlining design, procurement and construction phases and improve the efficiency of plant operation, all of which are necessary to lower the costs of nuclear generated electricity.

Further development will be needed to achieve regulatory acceptance of smart technologies;

for example, the signals from the “smart” systems must be correlated with reliability, and criteria must be developed for when to do maintenance and replacement.

Annex 20 describes a programme being carried out under the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy Research Initiative to develop a set of tools and methodologies that can improve reliability and safety of nuclear power plants through the use of “smart” equipment and predictive maintenance technology.