Under DOE Idaho Operations Office Contract DE-AC07-05ID14517ii EXECUTIVE SUMMARYThe U.S. Department of Energy's Light Water Reactor Sustainability program has developed a control room simulator in support of control room modernization at nuclear power plants in the U.S. This report highlights the recent completion of this reconfigurable, full-scale, full-scope control room simulator buildout. The simulator is fully reconfigurable, meaning it supports multiple plant models, including those developed by different simulator vendors. The simulator is full-scale, using glasstop touch-sensitive panels to digitally display the analog control boards found in existing plants. The present installation features 15 glasstop panels that are linked together, uniquely achieving a complete control room representation. To the authors' knowledge, this is the largest single installation of glasstop panels in the world. The simulator is also full-scope, meaning it uses the same thermal-hydraulic and physically simulated plant models used by training simulators found at operating nuclear power plants. Unlike in the plant training simulators, their deployment on glasstop panels allows a high degree of customization of the panels, allowing the simulator to be used for research on design issues of new digital control systems for control room modernization.Control room modernization goes beyond like-for-like replacement of analog instrumentation with digital control systems. The simulator is being used to design additional functionality that enhances operator control and awareness such as:• Access important trend information to allow the operators better to understand emerging conditions, • Perform calculations that must otherwise be done manually by the operators, • Provide prioritized alarm lists that help the operators respond more quickly to transients, • Provide helpful checklists to augment paper-based control room procedures, and • Automate previously manually performed actions.This report includes separate sections discussing the glasstop panels, their layout to mimic control rooms of actual plants, technical details on creating a multi-plant and multi-vendor reconfigurable simulator, and current efforts to support control room modernization at U.S. utilities. The glasstop simulator provides an ideal test bed for prototyping and validating new control room concepts. Equally importantly, it is helping create a standardized and vetted human factors engineering process that can be used across the nuclear industry to ensure control room upgrades maintain and even improve current reliability and safety. We would also like to thank Steven Freel of GSE Systems, Inc., and his staff for their support of the cross-platform simulator buildout. Finally, we thank Brandon Rice and Nic Johnson for their expert support in assembling the software and hardware infrastructure used by the simulator, and to Chris Morgan for taking the simulator photographs included in this report.
Control room modernization will be an important part of life extension for the existing light water reactor fleet. None of the 99 currently-operating commercial nuclear power plants (NPPs) in the United States has completed a full-scale control room modernization. NPP main control rooms for the existing commercial reactor fleet remain significantly analog, with only limited digital modernizations. Control room upgrades in the United States do not achieve the full potential of newer technologies that might otherwise enhance NPP and operator performance. The goal of the control room upgrade benefits research is to identify previously overlooked benefits of modernization, identify candidate technologies that may facilitate such benefits, and demonstrate these technologies through human factors research. This report describes a pilot study of control room upgrades to the
The Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) and Idaho National Laboratory have designed, implemented, tested and installed a functioning prototype of a set of large screen overview and procedure support displays for the Generic Pressurized Water Reactor (GPWR) simulator in the U.S. Department of Energy's Human Systems Simulation Laboratory. The overview display is based on IFE's extensive experiences with large screen overview displays in the Halden Man-Machine Laboratory (HAMMLAB), and presents the main control room indicators on a combined three-screen display. The procedure support displays are designed and implemented to provide a compact but still comprehensive overview of the relevant process measurements and indicators to support operators' good situational awareness during the performance of various types of procedures and plant conditions.
As part of the U.S. Department of Energy's Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program, the Digital Architecture (DA) Project focuses on providing a model that nuclear utilities can refer to when planning deployment of advanced technologies. The digital architecture planning model (DAPM) is the methodology for mapping power plant operational and support activities into a DA that unifies all data sources needed by the utilities to operate their plants.The DA is defined as a collection of information technology capabilities needed to support and integrate a wide spectrum of real-time digital capabilities for performance improvements of nuclear power plants. DA can be thought of as integration of the separate instrumentation and control and information systems already in place in nuclear power plants, which are brought together for the purpose of creating new levels of automation in plant work activities.
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