New Plant Integrated Scheduling

Over the past couple of months I’ve been working on an integrated schedule of all the activities related to new plants between the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the nuclear industry. To map and analyze all the activities and resources in planning these tasks, we have been using a software tool called Primavera:

With Primavera, you will:
• Select the right strategic mix of projects.
• Assure project, IT and corporate governance.
• Enhance processes and methods.
• Improve project team collaboration.
• Measure progress toward objectives.
• Complete more projects successfully and with the intended payback.

For those who have never heard of Primavera, it is a tool 100 times better and more sophisticated than the standard planning tool Microsoft Project. Many utilities use this tool to help them plan for construction projects, maintenance and refueling outages, and company plans and objectives to name a few.

There are basically three topics put into our schedule to help us plan and resource appropriately the activities we will be working on with the NRC: updating the Standard Review Plan, updating and drafting associated Regulatory Guides and working on proposed Rulemakings.

The Standard Review Plan (pdf) is:

…prepared for the guidance of staff reviewers in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation in performing safety reviews of applications to construct or operate nuclear power plants and the review of applications to approve standard designs and sites for nuclear power plants. The principal purpose of the SRP is to assure the quality and uniformity of staff safety reviews. It is also the intent of this plan to make information about regulatory matters widely available and to improve communication between the NRC, interested members of the public, and the nuclear power industry, thereby increasing understanding of the review process.

The NRC Regulatory Guides:

…describe methods acceptable to the NRC staff of implementing specific parts of the NRC's regulations and also, in some cases, describe techniques used by the staff in evaluating specific problems or postulated accidents. Guides also may advise applicants of information the NRC staff needs in reviewing applications for permits and licenses.

NRC's regulations:

…sometimes called rules, impose requirements that licensees must meet to obtain or retain a license or certificate to use nuclear materials or operate a nuclear facility. These regulations govern the transportation of materials; the use of materials at such nuclear facilities as power plants, research reactors, uranium mills, fuel facilities, and waste repositories; and the use of materials for medical, industrial, and academic purposes. The process of developing regulations is called rulemaking.

Our goals (NRC and the industry) are to update all the SRPs and Regulatory Guides associated with the SRPs by March 2007. We want to have these documents finished six months prior to the first set of submissions of Combined License Applications (COLA) expected to come in by fall 2007.

The reason we want these done a half year in advance is for the companies writing the applications. The companies need to make sure they can answer all the questions asked from the SRP and will write their applications based on guidance from the Regulatory Guides.

We are planning to submit quality COLAs and to do so we need to know what the NRC is thinking and how they will review them. Thus the purpose of SRPs and Regulatory Guides.

Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power, Electricity, NRC, Microsoft, Resource Planning, Primavera

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...

NEI Nuclear Notes

Search This Blog