Experimental Development of Power Reactor Intelligent Control

The US nuclear utility industry initiated an ambitious program to modernize the control systems at a minimum of ten existing nuclear power plants by the year 2000. That program addresses urgent needs to replace obsolete instrumentation and analog controls with highly reliable state-of-the-art computer-based digital systems. Large increases in functionality that could theoretically be achieved in a distributed digital control system are not an initial priority in the industry program but could be logically considered in later phases. This paper discusses the initial development of an experimental sequence for developing, testing, and verifying intelligent fault-accommodating control for commercial nuclear power plant application. The sequence includes an ultra-safe university research reactor (TRIGA) and a passively safe experimental power plant (Experimental Breeder Reactor 2).