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“With the plant and digital control systems (DCS) designs being firmed up in parallel with the simulator’s development, the supplier and customer teams faced tremendous hurdles to complete this project,” said Peter Dawson, president of L-3 MAPPS. “We are extremely proud of what the team has accomplished on the Ling Ao Phase II program and are grateful to so many contributors, including representatives from DNMC, CNPEC, AREVA and Siemens for their outstanding collaboration.” 

Integrated with AREVA- and Siemens-supplied DCSs, replica control room panels, and a stimulated human-machine interface, the FSS features L-3 MAPPS’ advanced instructor station capabilities and a proven Windows-based graphical simulation environment. Advanced plant models have been deployed and validated for the reactor, thermal-hydraulic, balance of plant, electrical, and I&C for the turbine control and other miscellaneous systems not controlled by the AREVA/Siemens DCSs. The safety systems DCS is AREVA’s Teleperm XS, and the operational I&C DCS system is Siemens’ SPPA-T2000 with OM690 human-machine interface. 

Is all this true? Or is it contrary to what many nuclear professionals know to be the case with regulation of the nation's 104 reactors? I turned to John Bickel, who's impeccable credentials include several decades of nuclear engineering experience backed by advanced degrees in the field

Bickel has 36 years experience in the US and International nuclear engineering profession, specializing in reliability and risk assessment. He has a Masters Degree and PhD in nuclear engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. ~ John Bickel, left, attending a meeting of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency in Paris, where he chairs the special working group on Defense in Depth of Electrical Systems (DIDELSYS) ~ I asked Bickel what he thought of the AP article. Here are some highlights of what he said in a series of email exchanges. Bickel agreed to let me post his personal email comments here. Also, he agreed to let me post his contact information at the end of this blog post so that AP, or anyone else in the media, could contact him for confirmation. Here’s what he said. "I had hoped for more insight from a prestigious organization such as AP. Their article entitled: “US nuke regulators weaken safety rules” is pretty sloppy and indicative of the fact AP failed to research much of what they have written about."

Point and counterpoint

India had declared plans of spending $175 billion by 2030 on nuclear generation. In December, India had signed an agreement with France last December, which assigned $9.3 billion towards building two nuclear plants with the help of Areva, a Paris-based company. However, following the earthquake, concerned officials said that they would need to “revisit the entire thing” including their plans for setting up the new reactor plans.

Meanwhile, also in line with the planned grid would be a program called the Mediterranean Solar Plan, which is pushing for the quicker development of renewable energy sources in the southern and eastern rims of the Mediterranean, mostly through solar power, Kowal added. “This solar plan cannot become a reality if you don’t have a transmission system to transmit the electricity,” he said. Medgrid would serve as such a transmission system, to allow neighbor nations to benefit from each other’s renewable sources, rather than relying on polluting sources to fill in gaps during peak hours, according to Kowal.

The idea is to try to find out what could be this network all around the Mediterranean, but also to assess what could be the conditions to make it real because there are so many problems,” he added. One such problem, according to Kowal, is that the interconnections between the southeastern Mediterranean countries are currently very weak, particularly among Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. “If we want to develop this system, we will have to rely on submarine cables going from south to north,” he said, noting, however, that cables can currently only go to a maximum depth of 1,650 meters.