I-Nuclear Update: EDF, Areva overhaul UK EPR design review efforts to meet end-year deadline

EDF, Areva overhaul UK EPR design review efforts to meet end-year deadline by I-Nuclear

EDF and Areva have undertaken a major overhaul of their work on the UK EPR design in an effort to recapture lost time and still obtain UK Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) approval for the design by the end of the year.

At its widest, the gap between the time EDF and Areva had committed to deliver answers to ONR’s questions on the reactor design and the time they did deliver the answers was about four months, according to ONR data.

Earlier this year, however, EDF and Areva submitted revised resolution plans to try to make up that lost time and still resolve all 31 of the original unresolved design safety issues (known as generic design assessment issues or GDA issues) by the end of the year.

However, even against the new revised plans, the GDA co-applicants are already falling short, according to an ONR quarterly progress report for the period ending June 30 and published August 14.

An ONR spokeswoman said September 3 the shortfall in June against the revised resolution plans “is small and EDF and Areva are working to recover this.”

“The original resolution plan schedules showed EDF and Areva would deliver of all required information during 2012,” the spokeswoman said.

“The revised resolution plan schedules also show delivery of all required information during 2012….So it's a case of EDF and Areva delivering the same work as previously planned, but on different dates than previously planned, within the same overall completion timescale,” the spokeswoman said.

In a follow-up September 4, the spokeswoman said that because EDF and Areva have allocated more resources to the resolution of the GDA issues, ONR could better allocated its own resources.

“The submission of the revised plans follows numerous meetings between the regulators and the requesting parties, in which EDF and Areva sought to demonstrate to ONR and the Environment Agency that the outstanding items could be delivered in accordance with their timings,” the spokeswoman said September 4.

“The revised schedules enable us to programme our work to assess the submissions they will make with more confidence. We have also reviewed and increased our assessment team resources and increased the intensity of our reviews and exchanges with EDF and Areva,” she said.

“If they sustain these improvements for the items that are still to be delivered, and if they remain responsive to any questions that we raise, then we believe that the programmes that are set out in the revised resolution plans can be achieved,” she said.

“The revised plans will not affect the robustness of our assessment,” the spokeswoman said. “ONR will only close a GDA issue after it is has received all planned information, assessed it, and is satisfied that the information provided adequately address the issue,” she said.

Four of 31 GDA issues closed

Since the issuance of the ONR GDA quarterly progress report August 14, EDF and Areva have closed out one more GDA issue related to seismic analysis methodology (GI-UKEPR-CE-06).

That brings to four the number of GDA issues that have achieved closure, leaving 27 more to finish in the next four months.

Another GDA issue, GI-UKEPR-FS-04 on the steam generator tube rupture safety case, appears near to being closed out as well.

EDF and Areva’s original resolution plan for this issue showed this issue being closed out by the end of 2011.

They did not issue a revised resolution plan for this issue, the ONR spokeswoman said, because “they have now delivered almost all of the required documentation, and the final deliverable is dependent on a response to a technical question that we are expecting to receive this week,” she said September 3.

Control and Instrumentation

The controversial control and instrumentation (C&I) system for the UK EPR remains among the 27 outstanding GDA issues.

In ONR’s latest quarterly report, C&I remains the only topical area of the design that remains almost entirely in the “red” in the ‘red-amber-green’ metric table.

A red shading signifies that closure of the GDA Issue “is in serious doubt with major risks apparent,” according to the ONR report.

In 2009, UK regulators joined with their French and Finnish counterparts in issuing a joint regulatory letter of concern about the digital C&I on the EPR.

To date only the French regulators have resolved their concerns (for a fuller account, see iNM, May ’12, 1).

In April, French nuclear regulator Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire (ASN) lifted its reservations on the digitial C&I for the EPR under construction at Flamanville, France (Flamanville-3).

However, although ASN said it considered the changes that Areva had made to the C&I architecture satisfactory and allowed EDF to continue deployment of the EPR, ASN said the detailed design would be analyzed further by ASN prior to commissioning.

In the UK, the issue remains stuck in the GDA Issue resolution process. An ONR spokeswoman said September 3 that ONR was in continuing contact with its fellow regulators in France and and Finland (where EPRs are already under construction).

“Although the design of the control and instrumentation (C&I) systems for all EPRs superficially appear to be similar, there are real differences which mean that not all regulatory authorities have the same set of issues,” the ONR spokeswoman said September 3.

“ONR and the Environment Agency's focus is on our own set of GDA Issues on the UK EPR design, for which EDF and Areva have given us a set of resolution plans. “We are continuing to work in accordance with these plans, which show that there are a number of C&I related deliverables due later this year. Until these have been delivered and assessed we will not close out the GDA Issues,” the spokeswoman said.—David Stellfox

I-Nuclear | September 4, 2012 at 2:44 pm | Categories: Areva, EDF, New Build, Office for Nuclear Regulation, Regulation, UK | URL: http://wp.me/p22dAl-nC