Invensys Nuclear has won a major contract from DICS Intertrade to supply four of its Tricon safety controllers to the Rovno nuclear power plant at Kuznetsovsk in Ukraine.
Sep. 28, 2005 - Rovno operates a Russian-designed WER440 pressurised water reactor (PWR), which along with 14 other similar reactors provides over half of Ukraine's electricity output. The contract with DICS Intertrade covers the installation of a Tricon-based cold overpressure protection system (COPS) on each of the two 400MW reactor units at Rovno. Such protection is vital to the safe operation of PWRs, which are vulnerable to vessel damage when below normal operating temperatures.
A COPS compares pressure and temperature inputs against a preset setpoint curve and relieves the pressure when this setpoint is reached by opening power-operated relief valves (PORVs). This relief is important because at the low temperatures experienced during plant start-up and shutdown the reactor vessel is at risk from brittle fractures.
Each of the Rovno units has two PORVs that are capable of working independently and each will be linked to a dedicated, electrically isolated and geographically separated Tricon controller. The four Tricons will monitor three temperature detectors in each of six coolant loops and three primary system pressure transmitters, opening redundant PORVs to prevent pressure limits being exceeded.
Compared with other solutions, Tricon-based COPS applications offer great reliability, ease of online maintenance, inherent self-test diagnostics and enhanced operator awareness. The accurate balance provided by Tricon technology at Rovno will increase the coefficient of demand on the system, its reliability and therefore its overall availability.
Tricons are used in thousands of critical applications worldwide and this is the technology's third recent nuclear reactor safety related application. At the Kozloduy PWR in Bulgaria, the COPS system has operated flawlessly since being commissioned and the use of Tricon technology is actively being considered in other safety-related areas such as reactor control, reactor protection systems, turbo generation control and total unit control.
The Rovno contract will be implemented by Invensys Nuclear in conjunction with its partner DICS Intertrade, which is responsible for project management, design, purchasing, implementation, Factory Acceptance Test, Site Acceptance Test, licensing and documentation.