Nuclear power is very much an international industry. U.S., Canadian, and European vendors are actively involved in the deployment of modern nuclear reactors (including I&C systems) in Asia. I&C systems are routinely delivered across national boundaries; for instance U.S. designed systems have been implemented in Czech Republic, Ukraine, and South Korea; German designed systems have been implemented throughout Europe and proposed for the United States; Canadian designed systems have been installed in Canada and South Korea. The Canadian software engineering technology for safety critical software has been considered for adoption in the development of new I&C safety‐related systems outside of Canada. Japanese I&C systems have proven reliable and should attract wider interest.
The global nature of nuclear power points to the strong need for consistency in international sets of nuclear and other standards in addition to consistent approaches to licensing such systems. The application of standards in the nuclear industry is a nontrivial exercise. Many standards organizations worldwide develop standards that affect nuclear I&C systems. Developing a system in one country to one set of standards is no longer sufficient. As such systems cross national boundaries, they need to demonstrate conformance to more than one set of standards and must be licensable in the country of implementation.
There is a broad consensus on general principles and approaches in the standards, and national licensing approaches are converging. However, there remain a number of specific issues on which consensus is still outstanding. Examples are the benefits to be gained from the use of formal methods, how to quantify the benefits from applying diversity principles to software, methods for measuring and achieving software reliability and requirements, and methods for the validation of transformation tools and of their output. As technology advances, issues of concern today may be solved, or new issues may arise. Nuclear industry standards and regulatory criteria will have to be periodically updated to keep pace with new international standards, increasing regulatory rigor with respect to software, fast‐paced computer technology advances, and experience gained, both within and outside the nuclear industry, for safety‐related computer‐based I&C systems.
