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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.”
C. Sexton, T. Toll, B. McConkey, G, Harmon (AMS)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1232-1241
Electrical cables provide essential functions such as delivery of power or instrumentation signals for most industrial monitoring systems. Most cables installed in plants use organic polymer insulation materials that can become brittle, crack, or degrade over time from exposure to harsh environmental conditions such as elevated temperature, moisture, vibration, mechanical shock and radiation. The focus of this paper describes an overall strategy for condition monitoring (CM) of electrical cables using both in-situ and laboratory assessment techniques. This cable CM strategy includes several steps to assess the health and manage the aging of the cables during the operating life of an industrial facility. These steps include performing As-Found evaluations to determine the current condition of installed cables. After the completion of the initial assessments, in-situ cable evaluations and testing are conducted to identify potential issues in the circuits including degraded terminations, splices and/or connections as well as identify degraded sections of cable insulation. This testing is accomplished with non-destructive evaluation (NDE) CM techniques that can be applied in-situ without adversely affecting the cable circuit or the end device. The As-Found and in-situ evaluations provide information about the current condition of the cable circuits as well as data used for trending age related degradation and estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of the cables with regard to the environmental conditions they are exposed to during normal operation.