Deploying
Control Room
Modernization
By Bruce Hallbert, Idaho National
Laboratory.
Bruce Hallbert
Bruce Hallbert is the Director of
Nuclear Energy Enabling Technologies
at the Idaho National Laboratory, a
U.S. Department
of Energy National
Laboratory located in
Idaho Falls, Idaho.
He is the research
pathway lead of
Instrumentation,
Information, &
Control Systems
research for the
DOE-sponsored
Light Water Reactor
Sustainability
Program (LWRS)
and the national
technical director of
Advanced Sensors
and Instrumentation
research for the
DOE-sponsored Nuclear Energy
Enabling Technologies (NEET)
program. He is the past President
of the International Association of
Probabilistic Safety Assessment and
Management (IAPSAM). He received
his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental
Engineering from Vanderbilt University
in Nashville, Tennessee.
An interview by Newal Agnihotri, Editor
of Nuclear Plant Journal, at the Utility
Working Conference in Amelia Island,
Florida on August 16, 2016.
1.
What is the scope of INL’s work in
modernizing control rooms?
We at the Idaho National Laboratory
(INL), have been working with the
existing fleet of light water reactors
through the Department of Energy’s Light
Water Reactor Sustainability Program,
where we are partnering with the Electric
Power Research Institute through a
consortium of light water reactor owner-
operators to address aging and pending
obsolescence issues in technology that
are facing the existing fleet of light water
reactors, especially with regard to control
rooms.
Sometimes when
things age and fail,
there can be a very
short planning hori-
zon to respond. What
we’ve been trying
to do is to develop
a more incremental
process to moderniz-
ing things that allows
for integration of new
digital technologies,
employing things like
human factors engi-
neering principles and
a more systematic en-
gineering approach,
so that the resulting
new digital technolo-
gies look and feel like they belong to-
gether.
If you can imagine, over time many
of the systems in a nuclear power plant
control room, the analog technologies are
going to need to be replaced by digital
technologies. One thing we have to
consider is how is that going to be done.
Well, we have an approach to manage
that, so that to the operating crew, it feels
as though there was a logical approach to
it.
Another approach that we’re taking
is working with several utilities to take
a longer view, which says look, 10 to 15
years down the road, 5, 10, 15 years, and
say is there a way to look at the systems
that are going to be affected by capital
asset management plans, and is there
a way for us to plan how the control
room could be modernized to develop an
integrated design for the operating crew,
so that they feel and it looks as though, in
5, 10, or 15 years, that the control room
36
NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, September-October 2016
has been redesigned with an end state in
mind. We call that long-term end state
vision.
We’ve been working on developing
this end state vision with several different
nuclear utilities around the country and
looking at different ways to achieve the
end state vision, workingwith vendors and
suppliers to those utilities and following
a regulatory approach and process, and
human factors engineering principles,
incorporating those into the design, so
that at the end of this, the operators, the
engineers, the entire organizations that are
involved, and have had a significant deal
of interaction, a lot of design influence,
and the resulting design has followed
a very rigorous approach that is highly
usable, very safe and is highly integrated,
with regard to modern design principle,
especially human factors engineering.
Those are the kinds of things that
we’re doing right now. We’re also
developing some advanced technologies,
like computerized software support
systems that employ advanced modeling
and simulation tools underneath them,
that can incorporate faster than real-time
analyses to study system performance and
report issues to the operating crew before
the operating crew would ever become
aware or detect it themselves. These are
based upon new multiphysics codes that
the National Laboratories are very good at
working with. We’ve just started testing
some of these concepts with operating
crews recently. We’re not looking at
implementing those anytime really soon,
but the reception and feedback has been
overwhelmingly positive. Crews are very
interested in how these systems work,
and they can see the value and benefit of
these technologies immediately.
2.
What is the progress of your outage
management control center being
implemented at Palo Verde nuclear power
plant?
That project is continuing. It’s called
the advanced outage control center. A
number of utilities have picked up on
that technology, which is free. It doesn’t
cost them anything to use it. There are a
number of utilities now that have sort of
a working group around this technology.
They share lessons learned. They
benchmark a little bit with one another.
My hope is that INPO and vendors will
