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DOE secretary and New York congressman call for reopening of Indian Point
Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright joined U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler (R., N.Y.) at the site of the closed Indian Point nuclear power plant on Friday, March 6, as Lawler called for the reopening of the facility. He emphasized that the shutdown of the plant in 2021 has led to higher electricity costs for the people of New York state and increased strain on the state’s electric grid.
Hanna Koskinen, Jari Laarni, Marja Liinasuo (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland), Leena Salo (Fortum Power and Heat Oy)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 488-498
We present an application of Systems Usability Case (SUC) as an overall human factors validation approach in a nuclear power plant control room modernization project. SUC enables a requirement-based human factors evaluation of complex technical systems that may cover the entire verification and validation process. The SUC is based on the Safety Case approach and on the Systems Usability construct. One of the main aims of establishing a Safety Case is to bring to the front the arguments and evidence for safety in such a way that the reasoning supports the work of a regulator or licensing organization. In the end, the SUC enables evaluating the Systems Usability of a system and making a reasonable solid argument about the acceptance of the system for use. The question is how the conclusions are reached through a reasoning process, in which the arguments are made about the evidence to approve or reject the claim concerning the quality of the system. The paper presents an application of the SUC to real data from an integrated system validation of the modernized main control room of Loviisa nuclear power plant. The results of the validation are discussed from the point of view of how the SUC approach enabled forming a statement about the acceptance of the control room. Moreover, some examples are given to demonstrate the learnings (e.g., strengths and weaknesses) as well as the development needs of the SUC approach.