Digital Full-Scope Simulation of a Conventional Nuclear Power Plant Control Room, Phase 2: Installation of a Reconfigurable Simulator to Support Nuclear Plant Sustainability

Abstract

Under DOE Idaho Operations Office Contract DE-AC07-05ID14517ii EXECUTIVE SUMMARYThe U.S. Department of Energy's Light Water Reactor Sustainability program has developed a control room simulator in support of control room modernization at nuclear power plants in the U.S. This report highlights the recent completion of this reconfigurable, full-scale, full-scope control room simulator buildout. The simulator is fully reconfigurable, meaning it supports multiple plant models, including those developed by different simulator vendors. The simulator is full-scale, using glasstop touch-sensitive panels to digitally display the analog control boards found in existing plants. The present installation features 15 glasstop panels that are linked together, uniquely achieving a complete control room representation. To the authors' knowledge, this is the largest single installation of glasstop panels in the world. The simulator is also full-scope, meaning it uses the same thermal-hydraulic and physically simulated plant models used by training simulators found at operating nuclear power plants. Unlike in the plant training simulators, their deployment on glasstop panels allows a high degree of customization of the panels, allowing the simulator to be used for research on design issues of new digital control systems for control room modernization.Control room modernization goes beyond like-for-like replacement of analog instrumentation with digital control systems. The simulator is being used to design additional functionality that enhances operator control and awareness such as:• Access important trend information to allow the operators better to understand emerging conditions, • Perform calculations that must otherwise be done manually by the operators, • Provide prioritized alarm lists that help the operators respond more quickly to transients, • Provide helpful checklists to augment paper-based control room procedures, and • Automate previously manually performed actions.This report includes separate sections discussing the glasstop panels, their layout to mimic control rooms of actual plants, technical details on creating a multi-plant and multi-vendor reconfigurable simulator, and current efforts to support control room modernization at U.S. utilities. The glasstop simulator provides an ideal test bed for prototyping and validating new control room concepts. Equally importantly, it is helping create a standardized and vetted human factors engineering process that can be used across the nuclear industry to ensure control room upgrades maintain and even improve current reliability and safety. We would also like to thank Steven Freel of GSE Systems, Inc., and his staff for their support of the cross-platform simulator buildout. Finally, we thank Brandon Rice and Nic Johnson for their expert support in assembling the software and hardware infrastructure used by the simulator, and to Chris Morgan for taking the simulator photographs included in this report.

Simulator Feature Framework: Requirements to Support Training, Research, and Education

“…Glasstop simulators offered a promising solution in which virtual analog bays representing the physical control boards can be digitally displayed (Boring et al, 2013). Armed with virtual digital emulation afforded by modern computing, human factors researchers demonstrated the use of simulators as testbeds for validating new plant models, digital control systems, and concepts of operations that might prove difficult (or impracticable) to test in training simulators.…”

“…With most of the US commercial nuclear fleet approaching or exceeding their end of life, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) granted license extensions from the original 40 years to 60 years to allow the fleet to continue to operate (Boring et al, 2013). Life extensions require the enhancement of some existing technologies and outright replacement of others.…”

Epistemiation

“…The prototypes were necessary to run simulations required for operator performance assessment as part of NUREG-0711, but they also served the vital role of depicting the design for operators to examine, allowing them to walk through the interface and discuss design options. In addition, a virtual digital representation of the control boards from the operator's plant was simulated at the Human Systems Simulation Laboratory (HSSL; Boring et al, 2013). The HSSL is capable of simulating the existing control room along with any modifications that are proposed by the new HMI.…”

Change Detection for Measuring Attention Allocation

“…Nuclear power plant operators use a complex humanmachine interface (HMI) in the form of a control room with control boards containing thousands of indicators and controls (Boring et al, 2013). Operators face the challenging task of monitoring and controlling the plant to ensure safe, efficient, and reliable electrical power production.…”

“…In particular, environments with a large amount of varying visual depth planes and disparate visual regions that require coordination into a composite scene can be quite difficult. The Human Systems Simulation Laboratory (HSSL; Boring et al, 2013) located at Idaho National Laboratory is an example of a particularly challenging eye tracking environment.…”