Areva has announced an alliance with risk-consulting company Etranco as a way to assist utilities deal with the new orders issued by the NRC as part of their post-Fukushima review.
Released earlier this week, the orders require specified plants to implement various safety upgrades by 2016. The agreement is part of a global Safety Alliance Areva has initiated that provides range of products, services and solutions associated with helping plants make safety upgrades.
“As the industry responds to Fukushima lessons learned, enhanced mitigation against major hazards such as seismic and flooding are necessary to further ensure the safety and integrity of nuclear plants,” said Mike Rencheck, CEO of Areva. “We look forward to partnering with Etranco in delivering solutions to our customers to provide them with the kind of expertise and service they need to ensure continued safe and reliable operation of their reactors.”
This new agreement combines the expertise from both companies' global engineering teams in order to provide integrated solutions to help customers resolve regulatory and technical issues related to external event risks. According to the release, the alliance will address challenges such as: seismic hazard curve, ground motion response spectra, containment and building response, equipment fragility analysis, seismic margins assessment or seismic probabilistic risk assessment and external flooding evaluation.