Rod, has the EPR been certified or not? If not, I expect they expect they will be shortly?
David Walters
The EPR has not been certified and is not particularly close to certification.
The EPR is under construction in Finland. One of the NRC's current projects is one that seeks international cooperation agreements that might ease the process of licensing a plant that has already been licensed in another country as long as that country has a respected licensing process.
Areva has been working on the translation of engineering drawings to US standards - not a trivial matter because of the different units of measure.
My understanding is that the process is nearing completion.
Areva has been working on the translation of engineering drawings to US standards - not a trivial matter because of the different units of measure.Conversion errors, just what the nuclear industry needs.
Areva has had some tangles with the Finnish government oversight. Variations in concrete mixing and erroneous weld spacing on rebar. That sort of thing.
I get the impression the Finns are just as tight or tighter than the NRC. I hope Areva gets into a nuclear 'groove' before they start building in the US. I would hate to see a lot of delays and cost overruns because of quality issues on the US build.
I can think of at least 2 nuclear reactors that were scrapped before being turned on because of deviations from design.
I can't understand why the United States of America retains the British Imperial measurement system when absolutely every other country in the world uses the International System (metric). Surely we can ditch this last tie to our colonial overlords?
Well there is always http://
www.metricationmatters.co...Metrication.pdf
Even so the US is probably more metric than it is non-metric.
Having read "Metrication Matters", I could (not safely I suspect) assume that the NRC could cope with documents submitted in SI units, rather than British Imperial. The major conversion factor would presumably be ensuring that all the electrical equipment in the control room, safety systems etc is 120v/60Hz rather than the 230v/50Hz that is used in Europe and substantial portions (though by no means all) parts of the world.
Just for the record, having done some research on the internet, I favor the entire world moving to 220v/60Hz. From what I have read, I believe that this voltage and frequency is optimal for a variety of reasons. This could be accomplished over a period of twenty years, but would require a lot of international goodwill, and backbone by politicians (who normally have their spines surgically removed on election).
Who knows what the control electronics are running on, they could be using something like 500 V @ 400 Hz for all I know (though I suspect they aren't) and it probably wouldn't be that hard to run the equipment on 230 V in the US anyway (although changing the power supplies of the equipment isn't going too hard either), most modern equipment doesn't really care about the frequency of the input power anyway.
Moving the entire world to 230 V @ 60 Hz is going to be a big undertaking which will probably require countries using 50 Hz (i.e. most of the world) to replace much of their generation equipment and probably most of their distribution equipment too along with some equipment that does rely on the power being at 50 Hz (old clocks come to mind) while those using 110 V are going to have to buy a lot of new appliances (although now a lot of things can handle anything).
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Ima...d_frequency.png for an idea of how much change there would need to be. Europe changed from 110 V to 230 V but that was at the beginning when there wasn't really all that much infrastructure around. While it would be a good idea to move to 230 V @ 60 Hz it'll probably be too expensive and too disruptive to be worth it.
I recently discovered your blogs and I have been reviewing them in reverse order and learning more about the commercial nuclear plants with each blog.
I am a US Navy enlisted exnuke (late 1960's vintage) USS James Madison electrican and instructor at the USS Nautilus S5W prototype. I spent about 10 years at CCNPP as a SRO/control supervisor and my last 5 or so years as an engineering analyst working on lessons learned from other US reactors and Human Factors Engineering. I retired in the late 80's and now I'm trying to catch up with the commerical nuclear industry.
With the announcement that Constellation Energy might build CCNPP 3 I've been spending some time learning about the AREVA Evolutionary Power Reactor design. I've recently updated the info on the Wikipedia page for the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant page from the information I've gleanded on the Internet. This Generation III+ design is different (much more conservative) from the Generation II design that I worked with yet similar in some respects.
Again I've enjoyed reading your blogs. I just wanted to note regarding your March 31, 2007 article on "Amarillo Power Shifts to Unistar EPR", that EPR stands for Evolutionary Power Reactor not Evolutionary Pressurized Reactor. Earlier, the design designation had stood for European Pressurized Reactor before AREVA saw a big market in the US.
Regards,
Jeff
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