Nuclear Power Control, Reliability and Human Factors Part 1 pdf

Used under license from Shutterstock.com First published September, 2011 Printed in Croatia A free online edition of this book is available at www.intechopen.com Additional hard copies

NUCLEAR POWER – CONTROL, RELIABILITY AND HUMAN FACTORS

Edited by Pavel V Tsvetkov

Nuclear Power – Control, Reliability and Human Factors

Edited by Pavel V Tsvetkov

Published by InTech

Janeza Trdine 9, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia

Copyright © 2011 InTech

All chapters are Open Access articles distributed under the Creative Commons

Non Commercial Share Alike Attribution 3.0 license, which permits to copy,

distribute, transmit, and adapt the work in any medium, so long as the original

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have the right to republish it, in whole or part, in any publication of which they

are the author, and to make other personal use of the work Any republication,

referencing or personal use of the work must explicitly identify the original source Statements and opinions expressed in the chapters are these of the individual contributors and not necessarily those of the editors or publisher No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the published articles The publisher assumes no responsibility for any damage or injury to persons or property arising out

of the use of any materials, instructions, methods or ideas contained in the book

Publishing Process Manager Petra Zobic

Technical Editor Teodora Smiljanic

Cover Designer Jan Hyrat

Image Copyright Ensuper, 2010 Used under license from Shutterstock.com

First published September, 2011

Printed in Croatia

A free online edition of this book is available at www.intechopen.com

Additional hard copies can be obtained from orders@intechweb.org

Nuclear Power – Control, Reliability and Human Factors, Edited by Pavel V Tsvetkov

p cm

ISBN 978-953-307-599-0

free online editions of InTech

Books and Journals can be found at

www.intechopen.com

Contents

Preface IX

Part 1 Instrumentation and Control 1

Chapter 1 Sensor Devices with High Metrological Reliability 3

Kseniia Sapozhnikova and Roald Taymanov

Chapter 2 Multi-Version FPGA-Based Nuclear

Power Plant I&C Systems: Evolution of Safety Ensuring 27

Vyacheslav Kharchenko, Olexandr Siora and Volodymyr Sklyar

Chapter 3 Nuclear Power Plant Instrumentation and Control 49

H.M Hashemian

Chapter 4 Design Considerations for the Implementation of

a Mobile IP Telephony System in a Nuclear Power Plant 67

J García-Hernández, J C Velázquez- Hernández,

C F García-Hernández and M A Vallejo-Alarcón

Chapter 5 Smart Synergistic Security

Sensory Network for Harsh Environments: Net4S 85

Igor Peshko

Chapter 6 An Approach to Autonomous

Control for Space Nuclear Power Systems 101

Richard Wood and Belle Upadhyaya

Chapter 7 Radiation-Hard and Intelligent

Optical Fiber Sensors for Nuclear Power Plants 119

Grigory Y Buymistriuc

Chapter 8 Monitoring Radioactivity

in the Environment Under Routine and Emergency Conditions 145

De Cort Marc

VI Contents

Chapter 9 Origin and Detection

of Actinides: Where Do We Stand with the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Technique? 167

Mario De Cesare

Part 2 Reliability and Failure Mechanisms 187

Chapter 10 Evaluation of Dynamic J-R Curve for Leak Before

Break Design of Nuclear Reactor Coolant Piping System 189

Kuk-cheol Kim, Hee-kyung Kwon, Jae-seok Park and Un-hak Seong

Chapter 11 Feed Water Line

Cracking in Pressurized Water Reactor Plants 207

Somnath Chattopadhyay

Chapter 12 Degradation Due to Neutron

Embrittlement of Nuclear Vessel Steels:

A Critical Review about the Current Experimental and Analytical Techniques to Characterise the Material, with Particular Emphasis on Alternative Methodologies 215

Diego Ferreño, Iñaki Gorrochategui and Federico Gutiérrez-Solana

Chapter 13 Corrosion Monitoring

of the Steam Generators of V-th and VI-th Energy Blocks of Nuclear Power Plant “Kozloduy” 239

Nikolai Boshkov, Georgi Raichevski, Katja Minkova and Penjo Penev

Chapter 14 Collapse Behavior

of Moderately Thick Tubes Pressurized from Outside 257

Leone Corradi, Antonio Cammi and Lelio Luzzi

Chapter 15 Resistance of 10GN2MFA-A Low Alloy Steel to

Stress Corrosion Cracking in High Temperature Water 275

Karel Matocha, Petr Čížek, Ladislav Kander and Petr Pustějovský

Part 3 Component Aging 287

Chapter 16 Aging Evaluation for the Extension of

Qualified Life of Nuclear Power Plant Equipment 289

Pedro Luiz da Cruz Saldanha and Paulo Fernando F Frutuoso e Melo

Chapter 17 Non-Destructive Testing for

Ageing Management of Nuclear Power Components 311

Gerd Dobmann

Part 4 Plant Operation and Human Factors 339

Chapter 18 Human Aspects of NPP Operator Teamwork 341

Márta Juhász and Juliánna Katalin Soós

Chapter 19 The Human Factors Approaches

to Reduce Human Errors in Nuclear Power Plants 377

Yong-Hee Lee, Jaekyu Park and Tong-Il Jang

Chapter 20 Virtual Control Desks for Nuclear Power Plants 393

Maurício Alves C Aghina, Antônio Carlos A Mól, Carlos Alexandre F Jorge, André C do Espírito Santo, Diogo V Nomiya, Gerson G Cunha, Luiz Landau,

Victor Gonçalves G Freitas and Celso Marcelo F Lapa

Chapter 21 Risk Assessment in Accident Prevention

Considering Uncertainty and Human Factor Influence 407

Katarína Zánická Hollá

Preface

Due to economic growth and increasing population, energy demands must be satisfied

in a sustainable manner assuring inherent safety, efficiency and minimized environmental impact Nuclear power has long posed a dilemma for environmentalists and scientists alike On the one hand it is seen as a cheap, clean energy source whilst on the other some have concerns over its ability to dispose of radioactive waste Whichever viewpoint one may assume, nuclear power is at the forefront of clean energy technology and can be made available on a large scale to meet energy needs of the rapidly growing world

Today’s nuclear reactors are safe and highly efficient energy systems that give electricity and a multitude of co-generation energy products ranging from potable water to heat for industrial applications Meanwhile, a catastrophic earthquake and a tsunami in Japan led to the nuclear accident that forced us to rethink our approach to nuclear safety and design requirements It also encouraged the growing of interest for advanced nuclear energy systems and next generation nuclear reactors, inherently capable of withstanding natural disasters, avoiding catastrophic consequences and leaving no environmental impact Advances in reactor designs, materials and human-machine interfaces assure safety and reliability of emerging reactor technologies, eliminating possibilities for high-consequence human error, such as those which have occurred in the past New instrumentation and control technologies based in digital systems, novel sensors and measurement approaches facilitate safety, reliability and economic competitiveness of nuclear power options

Autonomous operation scenarios are becoming increasingly popular to consider for small modular systems designed for remote regions with limited industrial infrastructure or regions with no such infrastructure but with human population whose safety, prosperity and growth depend on a reliable energy supply

This book is one in a series of books on nuclear power published by InTech It consists

of four major sections and contains twenty-one chapters on topics from key subject areas pertinent to instrumentation and control, operation reliability, system aging and human-machine interfaces.The book opens with the section on instrumentation and control aspects of nuclear power The following sections and included chapters address selected issues in reliability and failure mechanisms, component aging, plant

The goal of this book and the entire book series on nuclear power is to present nuclear power to our readers as a promising energy source that has a unique potential to meet energy demands with minimized environmental impact, near-zero carbon footprint, and competitive economics via robust potential applications

The book targets a broad potential readership group - students, researchers and specialists in the field - who are interested in learning about nuclear power The idea is

to facilitate intellectual cross-fertilization between field experts and non-field experts taking advantage of methods and tools developed by both groups The book will hopefully inspire future research and development efforts, innovation by stimulating ideas

We hope our readers will enjoy the book and will find it both interesting and useful

Pavel V Tsvetkov

Department of Nuclear Engineering

Texas A&M University United States of America

Part 1

Instrumentation and Control

1

Sensor Devices with High Metrological Reliability

Kseniia Sapozhnikova and Roald Taymanov

D.I.Mendeleyev Institute for Metrology,

Russia

1 Introduction

At present, a great number of embedded sensor devices provide monitoring of operating conditions and state of equipment, including nuclear reactors of power plants The metrological reliability of measuring instruments built in equipment determines the validity

of measurement information The quality of production, operating costs, and the probability

of accidents depend on the validity of measurement information coming to control systems The validity is particularly important in such fields as nuclear power engineering, cosmonautics, aviation, etc For some products in definite periods of their operation, even a short-term loss of confidence in measurement accuracy is unacceptable

The key problems of the measurement information validity are related to the sensor metrological reliability, since their components age and their parameters drift with time Sudden failures can also happen All this can result in control errors The sensor devices used to monitor the condition of technological equipment and the parameters of a technological process, are, as a rule, subject to a variety of influencing quantities Possible consequences of these influences are, for example, depositions, magnetization, and so on In some cases, the effect of the influence quantity can be weakened by a careful design of the sensor For example, the rate of fouling of a sensor surface can be reduced by polishing the surface However, it is not always possible to develop a sensor device immune to influencing factors over a long period of operation Sometimes, economic reasons may play

a role as well

At present, the traceability of measurements is provided by periodic calibrations or verifications (hereinafter both of these procedures will be referred to as calibrations) Accordingly, within the period of operation the probability of a metrological failure depends on the length of the calibration interval (CI) The state of a secondary transducer can be verified by supplying electrical signals of reference values to its inputs As demonstrated in (Fridman, 1991), between 40% and 100% of all measuring instrument failures are due to metrological failures Improvements in production quality result in decrease of the number of failures, the share of metrological failures being increased because with the technology improvement the share of sudden failures decreases It is not expedient

to apply fundamental assumptions of the classical reliability theory (e.g., mutual independence of failure rates and stability of a failure rate) to measuring instruments Usage

of methods based on these assumptions leads to crude errors in the CI determination

To decrease the risk of getting unreliable information, usually the CI is no more than 2-3 years However, the cost of a sensor device calibration is typically 35–300 euro, and the

Nuclear Power – Control, Reliability and Human Factors

4

number of sensor devices is growing year by year If a CI duration is constant, the proportion of operating costs spent on calibration will rise to an unacceptable level In many cases, it is necessary to disrupt a technological process in order to carry out sensor device calibration Such interference leads to additional costs

The standard (ISO/IEC, 1999) states that it is ‘‘the responsibility of the end-user organization to determine the appropriate calibration interval under the requirements of its own quality system” The guidelines (OIML, 2007) state that ‘‘the initial decision in determining the CI is based on the following factors:

 instrument manufacturer’s recommendation;

 expected extent and severity of use;

 the influence of the environment;

 the required uncertainty in measurement;

 maximum permissible errors (e.g., by legal metrology authorities);

 adjustment of (or change in) the individual instrument;

 data about the same or similar devices, etc.”

Furthermore, it is recommended to adjust the initial CI for the process of operation ‘‘in order

to optimize the balance of risks and costs”, due to a number of reasons, for example:

 the instruments may be less reliable than expected;

 the operating conditions may vary significantly from the manufacturer’s recommended ranges, requiring an adjustment to the CI;

 the level of drift determined by instrument recalibration can demonstrate that longer CIs are possible without any increase of risk;

 it may be sufficient to carry out a limited calibration of certain instruments instead of a full calibration, etc

However, in some cases, it is impossible to perform calibrations with a short CI, in order to obtain the data necessary for adjusting the CI value for the measuring instrument For many modern complex technical processes, the mean value of continuous running grows At present, for some processes the campaign duration has to be no less than 10 years

Measuring instrument operation conditions can vary considerably over the course of several CIs In industrial equipment, they can appreciably vary when upgrading the technological process, e.g., in case of production modernization Operation conditions for sensor devices in ship nuclear power sets will depend on the intensity of the equipment use For all the reasons given above, the end user does not want or has no possibility of affording the testing of each measuring instrument in order to provide grounds for optimizing the CI Calibrations are expensive, but as the experience shows, the majority of measuring instruments (according to various estimates which vary from 60% to 80% for all instruments submitted for calibrating) does not need it However, approximately 12% of measuring instruments have an error exceeding the permissible limits within the CI

The contradiction is obvious To reduce the costs associated with the interruption of a technological process and the calibration of built-in measuring instruments, it is desirable to calibrate as seldom as possible However, unreliable information received by a control system from measuring instruments, can cause failures and large economic losses To prevent this, it is necessary to check the measuring instrument state as often as possible

It is impossible to settle this contradiction using trivial methods of calibration