Nuclear Power Plant Control beyond the 1980s

Designers of nuclear power plant control and instrumentation systems are being pushed by an electronics technology that currently passes through several generations of development during the time taken to design and bring a plant into production. Despite the success of existing designs and the pressure to stick to them, the rapidity with which new components become available and others drop from the suppliers' shelves, require that we give attention to system architectures that are more tolerant of this situation. A distributed data base, containing both on-line and archival information, made available to all systems of a nuclear power plant by means of a highly reliable communications medium, could form the basis for such an architecture. It could not only solve this problem of rapid component development but also provide for complete and comprehensive plant control and surveillance. The possibility of implementing such schemes in an operating plant is probably ten years away but development must begin now if the new electronics technology is to have a planned place in the architectures of the future. At the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories a long range program is underway. It is exploiting extensive additions that were needed in the data acquisition and processing capability associated with engineering experiments in the large research reactors NRU and NRX.