Two international organizations released new standards on Wednesday addressing the maintenance of electrical equipment at nuclear plants.
Cables, their insulation and other electrical equipment critical to instrumentation and control systems at nuclear plants can degrade with time and use. While nuclear plants regularly monitor cables using in-service testing of the equipment attached to them, the International Electrotechnical Commission and the IEEE Standards Association reported that plant operators have traditionally not focused their monitoring efforts on the condition and potential degradation of the cables themselves. To that end, the organizations introduced a new standard, titled "IEC/IEEE 62582, Nuclear power plants -Instrumentation and control important to safety—Electrical equipment condition monitoring methods."
In a release, IEEE Nuclear Power Engineering Committee Chairman Satish Aggarwal said, " IEC/IEEE 62582 establishes, for the first time, a worldwide common standard of a series of condition monitoring techniques that can be selected and applied, as appropriate, to establish the actual condition of new or installed equipment. This test helps establish a baseline, which in turn allows nuclear plants to determine, with a high degree of confidence, how long equipment will be able to perform as expected, even in the event of a severe accident."
The organizations also made the case that standardized monitoring methods allow for the collection and sharing of compatible data across multiple sites and regions over time.