Siemens Power Corporation and Duke Engineering & Services will join to provideUS nuclear plants with I&C upgrades, under an agreement signed in November.
The new team is to offer turnkey upgrading in I&C from design to installation. Services will include full system integration, work practice preparation, operator and maintenance training, procedure revisions, regulatory consulting, systems testing, spare parts, and technical consultation and support.
Soon a total of 26 nuclear plants worldwide will be using Siemens’ digital I&C system, known as Teleperm. The Siemens/DE&S team believes that by upgrading from analogue to digital systems nuclear plants can improve their economics by reducing personnel costs, enhancing operational awareness and control, reducing the costs of engineering and documentation, increasing availability and optimising control. The system allows plant processes to be monitored remotely and controlled via operator-friendly control room displays, the team says.
Talking about the agreement, Karl-Heinz Lochner, vice president-I&C at Siemens, said the “well-matched team members should provide an extremely high level of confidence for our customers that these upgrades, important to the long-term operation of their plants, can be successfully undertaken with minimum economic and licensing risk”.
The team says that digital upgrades can be performed on all the plant systems needed for operation, surveillance, automation, monitoring and archiving.
