Annex IV

CHINA

IV–1. BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF NPP

In March 2009, China began the construction of four AP1000 units in the context of its Nuclear Power Selfreliance programme of which two units at Sanmen in Zhejiang Province and two units at Haiyang in Shandong Province. The Chinese government and every other party involved in the construction of these 4 AP1000 units paid particular attention to the progress, the safety and the economy of this project.

IV–1.1. Project data

The AP1000 standard design was imported from the Westinghouse Electrical and Stone & Webster International Consortium (WEC) as a Generation III nuclear steam supply system (NSSS) capable of delivering 3415 MW(th) of thermal power. Given the different coastal environmental conditions, particularly the different water temperatures of Sanmen and Haiyang, and the turbine/generators designed and manufactured by Mitsubishi Heavy Industry, the plants will develop a gross electric power of 1251 MW(e) for Sanmen and of 1253 MW(e) for Haiyang respectively. The construction duration for a single unit is 56 months from the first construction date to commercial operation date (COD).

IV–1.2. Project organization

The two utilities, Sanmen and Haiyang together with the State Nuclear Power Technology Company of China (SNPTC) are the joint-Purchaser of the AP1000 Nuclear Islands (NI). SNPTC is responsible for providing the whole NI to both utilities. The Shanghai Nuclear Engineering Research and Design Institute (SNERDI), subsidiary of SNPTC provides support to both utilities as the overall design Institute. The two utilities are responsible for the procurement of the CI and of the Balance of Plant.

IV–1.3. Contract type (Company)

Sanmen and Haiyang with this project in the context of the self-reliance programme use a multiple package contract type. An outline of the Sanmen vendors is provided in following Table IV–1.

TABLE IV–1. OUTLINE OF THE SANMEN MAIN COMPONENT SUPPLIERS

SNPEC : State Nuclear Power Engineering Company.

ECEPDI : East China Electric Power Design Institute (design supplier for the Sanmen Conventional Island) * U : the utility

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IV–2. LESSONS LEARNED

IV–2.1. Project management — Preparatory phase

The differences between the Chinese and the US regulatory requirements should be seriously dealt with during the project preparatory phase.

For instance, in China, the licensing process is more similar to the traditional two-step licensing process outlined in 10 CFR 50. A construction permit is issued before the issuance of a license. Upon completion of the construction phase, which is monitored by the regulatory authority, an operating license is granted through the amendment and the review process. On the other hand, in the USA, 10 CFR Part 52 outlines a Construction and Operating Licensing (COL) process for new nuclear power plants as a combined one-step construction and operating license and is issued upon completion of the NRC review of a standard design.

This difference was extensively discussed during the licensing phase of the Sanmen and Haiyang projects and finally the Sanmen and Haiyang utilities agreed to prove to the regulatory authority that the work done will be equivalent to all the steps required in 10 CFR Part 52. Other issues such as containment resistance to airplane collisions resulting from the 9-11 tragedy, occupational radiation exposure limits, and structural changes due to the extensive modularisation of the plant also drew intense attention during the construction licence process.

It is certain that inadequate completion of the design and engineering work prior to the start of construction is detrimental to the timely implementation of the project. WEC had still not completed the engineering work 18 months after the first concrete pour. This fact delayed construction activities causing continuous pressures on all organizations involved. It led to rescheduling of the manufacturing and construction steps, and to compromises on quality due to time constraints. Frequent engineering errors, corrections, rework and reassessments resulted in frustration and disappointment with regard to WEC’s engineering, although, to be fair, new engineering approaches in third generation reactors, first of a kind advanced safety features, and unproven equipment are not easily implemented.

IV–3. PROJECT MANAGEMENT – CONSTRUCTION PHASE

Structural modularization causes new challenges to manufacturing and construction. A steel type containment vessel is difficult to erect. Canned reactor coolant pump are still under testing and face construction schedule pressures. All obstacles should be moved in order not to delay project milestones.

To reduce construction cost, bulk materials should be procured internally in China rather than on the international market. Large amount of materials are specified in accordance with US industry practice, while they are not available on the Chinese local market. Bulk material equivalency studies and substitutions with local materials should be carried out. How to speed up the approval process for material substitution is a hot topic for project management. A lesson drawn from this is that bulk material substitution issues should be resolved at the very beginning of the construction phase.

In China, the construction of most of the currently operating plants and the new plants under construction has been awarded to large experienced organizations with comprehensive capabilities in nuclear component manufacturing, erection, and installation, with a basic understanding of the nuclear safety culture. However there are not enough skilled human resources from specialized workers to experienced project managers to handle the new generation reactor types such as the AP1000 that require new construction organization modes due to extensive modularisation, advanced construction methods etc. China is confident that the whole supply chain for nuclear power plants, from the design institute, to the equipment manufacturers and construction companies will accumulate much more experience and achieve excellent efficiency through the self-reliance programme of the Sanmen and Haiyang AP1000 nuclear power plant projects.

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Annex V

JAPAN

Construction and Start-up of Tomari NPP Unit 3

V–1. CONSTRUCTION APPROACH

The Hokkaido Electric Power Company (HEPCO) is the owner of the Tomari NPP comprising three operating PWR units. The latest unit to be connected to the grid, Tomari Unit 3, is a 3-loop PWR power plant with an electric output of 912 MW(e) supplied by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI). This is the newest unit in HEPCO and it is the newest PWR unit in Japan as well. The first concrete at Tomari Unit 3 was poured at the end of summer in 2004. The unit entered into commercial operation in December 2009. Figure V–I. is the construction schedule of Tomari Unit 3.

The Tomari site is located on a northern Japanese island. It is battered by strong winds and receives much snow in the winter. Therefore, civil works and building construction were temporarily suspended every year from the beginning of December until the end of March. This increased construction duration by one year compared to other sites. Consequently from first concrete to the start of commercial operation construction at Tomari lasted 64 months.

There are specific factors in the approach to construction of nuclear power plants in Japan.

(1)Japanese legislation defines that the sole licensee must be the electric power company. This implies that the electric power company is responsible for the safety of the plant and in that capacity it must submit for approval the Safety Analysis Report (SAR) but it is also responsible for the design and reliability of the plant; hence it must also submit for approval the Construction Plan (CP), containing all necessary detailed design information. Consequently, the electric power company becomes the sole counterpart to the regulatory body on all aspects of the project.

(2)All Japanese electric power companies are considerably large and have the tradition to do the engineering of their power plant themselves, and this not only for nuclear but also for conventional power plant. Therefore, the owner/utilities in Japan carry themselves the burden of major portions of the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) of their NPPs. Although the conceptual design work may be outsourced, the utilities manage everything else from the infrastructure, the access roads, the supply of utilities to the site (electricity, water, etc.), the site preparation, the general arrangement of the work areas, the interface between contractors, the scheduling of construction activities, at the site, to overseeing the work of all contractors from the safety, quality, scheduling and contractual standpoints. In order to manage and oversee the suppliers’ construction works at the site, a considerable number of qualified engineers and inspectors are required.

FIG. V–1. Construction schedule.

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(3)Consequently to the previous two factors, the Japanese electric companies have built nuclear power plants by awarding split-package contracts (the so-called island approach) as well as smaller component contracts. E.g. HEPCO awarded some 150 contracts for the construction of Tomari NPP Unit 3.

(4)Given the large number of utilities in Japan, each company built relatively few new nuclear power plants and this has made it difficult to maintain on their own a highly qualified workforce. Fortunately all utilities in Japan have developed and maintained good relationships with one another and willingly share their human resources where the need arises. Salaries and expenditures however continue to be paid by the original employers. This way the host utility can use the borrowed staff for its construction and the lending utility can maintain its qualified engineers for its next construction project.

The traditions and practices mentioned above were developed by HEPCO and other utilities as a result of their very large and intense involvement in their nuclear power plant construction activities. Participation in depth in the construction process was key to the success and accomplishment of nuclear construction in Japan. In addition, the following factors strongly contributed to the efficiency and rationalization of the construction process of Tomari Unit 3:

—Standardization of designs of SSCs particularly in the nuclear island due to systematic feedback from preceding plant construction projects;

—Maximization of factory pre-fabrication of SSCs;

—Large scale module pre-fabrication and open top installation;

—Construction schedule integration of main contractors with HEPCO’s schedule and confirmation of the activity sequence at the site;

—Cooperation between HEPCO’s construction and operation divisions.

V–1.1. Establishment of the start-up organization

The management responsibility of each system was gradually transferred to the Operation Preparation Division after commissioning. It meant that the shifts to operations had to be established before the first system turnover. The first commissioning and turnover to operations was that of the emergency transformer, because it had to provide electric power from the external transmission lines to the installed components and systems in the plant to allow their commissioning. The operation organization was initially small but sufficient to take over the emergency transformer and the house load bus. Then it was gradually strengthened as the following commissioned systems were one by one transferred under its jurisdiction.

HEPCO’ established that all commissioning and turnover should be done as early as possible taking into consideration the training time of the shift operators. That is to say, systems that could be tested before initial core loading should have been turned over. Consequently before initial core loading, the Operations organization was in full force and ready for stat-up since most systems had been transferred to Operations by that time.

V–2. COMMISSIONING SCHEME

V–2.1. Definition

The definition of ‘commissioning’ according to the IAEA glossary is; “The process by means of which systems and components of facilities and activities, having been constructed, are made operational and verified to be in accordance with the design and to have met the required performance criteria”. According to this definition, commissioning includes not only the system functional tests or plant startup tests, but also the turnover of all SSCs and of the whole plant from the construction contractors to the Owner/Operator.

The Owner/Operator had the right to take over only those SSCs (and at the end of the process the whole plant for the matter) that proved to meet the contractual specifications. The turnover commitments to HEPCO were defined in documents such as the supply technical specifications attached to the supply contracts and the suppliers’ design documents approved by HEPCO. However it was impossible for HEPCO alone to confirm all those items. Therefore, HEPCO employed a classification method and a component grading system to decide what items could be accepted in the construction/commissioning turnover to operations.

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