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NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, July-August 2014
New Products,
Services &
Contracts
New Products
SMR-160
Holtec’s
engineers have succeeded
in designing SMR-160 into a “walk-
away” safe nuclear power plant, which
means that if a calamity were to strike
- similar to the tsunami that devastated
Fukushima - the plant will passively
(without human intervention) switch to
and remain in a safe shutdown and cooled
configuration for an unlimited period.
Faced with an extenuating event, the
reactor will automatically shut down and
all of the plant’s fuel - both in the reactor
and the spent fuel pool - will remain in a
safely cooled state without the need for
electric power. Unlike its peers, which
all have limited duration coping periods,
requiring water make-up after a specific
number of hours or days, the SMR-160
plant is designed to remain passively
cooled indefinitely, without requiring any
operator activity.
Postulating an accident leading to a
sudden breach in a pressurized reactor
coolant line (known as LOCA in nuclear
parlance), a break in a main steam line,
or a sudden station blackout, the SMR-
160 plant would readily and passively
respond to any of these events without
any loss of its cooling capacity or risk of
release radioactivity or any other adverse
effect on the surrounding environment.
As a first line of defense, SMR-
160’s designers have eliminated the
single largest plant vulnerability - large
piping - entirely from the reactor coolant
system and containment building through
creative designs. The largest high-
pressure pipe in the plant is eight inches
in diameter.
A second transformative design
innovation leverages gravity combined
with conduction heat transfer - two
unfailingly reliable phenomena in
nature - to facilitate all necessary heat
removal from the plant’s nuclear fuel,
and subsequent expulsion of heat to the
atmosphere.
Patents on the innovative design
features that underlie the inherent safety
and stability of the SMR-160 plant have
been filed with the USPTO.
Contact: Amy Grant, telephone:
(213) 310-5010, email:
a.grant@holtec.
com
.
New Technology Meters
OTEK’s
New Technology Meters
(NTM) use nanotechnology and ultra-
efficient LEDs to produce an automatic
tricolor bargraph with four digit display
that only requires 50mW of power from
the signal.
Being able to function with such
low power requirement allows OTEK
to offer their NTM series with loop,
signal or external power. Model NTM-
5 is available in metal (nickel plated
aluminum) or plastic (94VO rated) and is
compatible for panel cutouts of 3" x 5.6"
and bezels of 3.1" x 6".
The NTM-5 includes isolated Serial
I/O (USB/RS485) to detect and alert
when the input has failed. The powerful
firmware includes four alarm set points,
math functions, polynomials, X-Y tables,
tare, scale, offset and much more for
complex algorithms. The NTM-5 is
available in up to 4 channels, making it
ideal for display/control of pressure, flow,
volume and temperature.
The NTM series offer a variety of
different low power consumption meters.
Contact: telephone: (520) 748-7900,
email:
Services
Tank Inspections
A partnership was recently formed
between
IHI Southwest Technologies,
Inc.
(IHI) and Newton Labs (Newton)
to meet the Nuclear Energy Institute
requirements for the inspection of nuclear
plant water storage tanks in accordance
with NEI 09-14,
Guideline for the
Management of Underground Piping
and Tank Integrity
. IHI will use Inspector
robots, designed and manufactured
by Newton Labs, to provide the most
advanced nondestructive evaluation
(NDE) tank inspection services currently
available in the nuclear industry.
Working underwater, without the
need to drain a tank, Inspector robots can
map and inspect over 90% of a tank floor
with specialized NDE sensors. This
includes inspecting within very close
proximity to the tank wall edge. The
inspection services combine the expertise
of both firms; phased array ultrasonic and
eddy current testing by IHI and optical
inspection, underwater laser scanning,
and robotics by Newton.
Inspector
robots
employ
a
combination of autonomous machine
vision navigation and direct operator
guidance to accurately identify and map
tank floor weld locations. This is followed
by a detailed inspection on a per-plate
basis, thus providing XYZ coordinate
locations of all flaws in the tank floor
using phased array UT and eddy current
systems. Locations of defects are pin-
pointed to within 1/8th of an inch using
additional overhead machine vision
technology attached inside of the tank
roof access.
Contact: Carlos Barrera, telephone:
(210) 256-4104, email:
cbarrera@ihiswt.
com
.
Outage Services
RSCS, Inc
has started a new Outage
Services Division led by Fred Erskine
and supported by Tina Inman to focus
on providing a full range of radiological
specialists to nuclear power plants during
outages. This division compliments their
Consulting Services Division, which has
an established record of providing project
management and technical radiation
safety services to nuclear utilities, such
as routine technical support services and
emergency response.
Nuclear power plants refuel their
reactors on 18 to 24 month cycles. During
these outage periods which typically last 3
to 6 weeks, plants shut down their reactors
and perform routine maintenance and
inspections. In order to accomplish all
of this work as quickly as possible, plants
augment their staff with hundreds of
temporary workers including, engineers,
laborers,
technicians,
supervisors,
and quality assurance professionals.
This temporary labor pool is supplied
by a limited number of companies
that focus on providing workers for
maintenance and non-health physics
related activities. RSCS distinguishes its
services from others staffing agencies as
a turnkey provider for technicians, health
physicists and radiological management
professionals. As a full-service provider,
RSCS can streamline the management
