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NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
Emil Wingstedt (IFE), Olli Saarela (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 721-732
Data reconciliation is a commonly used technique for correcting random errors in measurement data in the process industry. The technique uses models describing the mutual relationships of process variables related to available measurements. These models are based on knowledge of process physics. Measurement readings are adjusted so that especially mass and energy balances described by the model match. The technique has proven effective in reducing measurement uncertainties. The paper presents a Monte Carlo study of error propagation in data reconciliation of the turbine section of a VVER 440 nuclear power plant. Uncertainties in model parameters describing turbine dry efficiencies and the quality of steam exiting the steam generators are considered in addition to measurement noise. The impact of these factors on estimated reactor thermal power is evaluated, both individually and as joint impacts. For both the measurement signals and the plant parameters, the resulting effect on the uncertainty of thermal power is lower than the 2% uncertainty for reasonable levels of added noise. These results support the use of data reconciliation for reducing the uncertainty in thermal power.