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August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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North American construction is back—smaller and faster—at OPG’s Darlington
“The nuclear renaissance is real here,” said Ontario Power Generation’s Subo Sinnathamby on May 8, one year to the day after OPG secured a final investment decision to build the first of four planned BWRX-300 reactors at its Darlington nuclear power plant, and shortly after the new reactor’s foundation was lifted into place. “We got our license to construct in April and our [final investment decision] in May, and we’ve been off to the races since.”
Nathan Lau, Hao Wang (Virginia Tech), Shawn St. Germain, Andrea S. Harvey (INL), Matthew B. Weinger, Shilo Anders (Vanderbilt Univ Medical Center)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 664-673
Nuclear power plant (NPP) outage represents a major operational cost that must be minimized to sustain competitiveness in the US energy market. However, outage management can be challenging because myriad of interdependent activities may need adjustment over the course of the outage. We conducted a site vist to the Advanced Test Reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory and a literature review to identify general directions for innovations in interactive visualization for outage management. First, new approaches are needed to represent task and scheduling uncertainty to better support estimates of effort and cost overruns as tasks change during outages. This would allow staff to project the likelihood of overruns and reallocate resources as appropriate. Second, outage support software should facilitate visualization of resource constraints whether hard (e.g., regulatory requirements) or ‘soft’ (i.e., those with cost, morale, or other consequences). When responding to emergent issues or unplanned work, the outage staff must be aware of all potential alternatives (e.g., overtime, additional staff, deferrable tasks) and the short- and longer-term implications of each choice. Third, there is currently limited understanding of how best to support outage staff’s ability to simulate the impact of potential schedule adjustments in response to new or reallocated work. Graphical “what if” scenario depictions should be an important component of future visualization capabilities. To realize the potential of AOCC, interactive visualization for outage management must better support situation awareness, decision-making and planning.