Striving to maintain the nuclear design basis:
What you need in an electronic design engineering solution
In the 70s and 80s architectural firms created literally millions of pages of hard copy documentation on the design bases of nuclear plants while they were in construction. These documents contained valuable information, including plant configurations, specifications, calculations, drawings. In many cases the owner/operator was not given free and unrestricted access to these sources, but rather had to specifically request the information, and then had to pay for it too!
“The recommendations in this white paper will allow engineering users to perform engineering and configuration management consistently as an integral part of a fleet solution.”
– Nicholas Oliva, general supervisor engineering, Constellation Energy Nuclear Group
“In today’s environment of increasing regulatory scrutiny, this timely white paper provides valuable information and is needed for educational purposes.”
– Janice Hoerber, IT supervisor, development operations, AmerenUE
Once the owner/operators received the information, they often found it in fragmented pieces, stored only on paper, or in proprietary formats that were unreadable. As time has passed, nuclear plants continue to struggle to teach new engineers how to find and use the design bases information.
The single most important factor in an electronic design engineering process is the resolution and avoidance of the information silo problem. Organizations can end up spending millions to try and consolidate these data sources from time to time, but if information management is not addressed from an enterprise perspective, the problem will continue to return.
To read the complete white paper, please register for a link to the PDF download.
