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Conference Spotlight
2026 Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
Blades-in turbine inspections at Quad Cities set new benchmark for Constellation
When Constellation decided to install replacement Alstom low-pressure turbines at three of its boiling water reactor plants more than 15 years ago, one benefit was knowing the new turbines should operate reliably—and without major inspections—for several years.
Doo-Hyung Choe, Jae-Hyuk Baeg, Suk-Hwn Jung (Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction), Steve Yang (Doosan HF Controls Corp.)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 367-376
Rod Control System (RCS) is to control position of the neutron absorbing full-length rods (control rods or rods) in Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs). Although an RCS is classified as non-safety system, there is stringent requirement for its reliability and availability to avoid an unwanted reactor trip due to a single failure of the RCS. The unwanted reactor trip caused by a single failure of the RCS refers to Single Point Vulnerability (SPV) of the RCS, which is detrimental to an NPP’s continuous and healthy operations because of significant economic impact including operation & maintenance cost. Therefore, it is important to design and implement an RCS with high reliability, availability, operability, and maintainability that can tolerate faults and defeat the SPV for NPPs. For this reason, a modern and highly reliable RCS has been developed with the goal of reducing the SPV to zero and by applying disciplined specification and implementation of design as well as comprehensive Equipment Qualification (EQ) that are consistent with the 10 CFR50 Appendix B requirements. In the modernized RCS, full redundancy controller is used in both the logic and power cabinets. The other key improvements for this modernized RCS are the adoption of dual grippers (versus a single gripper used in the old RCS) and application of DC-hold function (not implemented in the old RCS). These design and implementation aims at completely eliminating the SPV and is fulfilled through analyzing 300 SPV cases in the operating history of the old RCS, which used non-redundant control components.