We’re launching our Guardline instrumentation and control (I&C) platform at the big ANS UWC event in Florida next week. We thought it’d be useful to describe what this means to our customers before we transition to exhibition mode and perhaps miss the chance to reflect on the big picture.
Safety systems sit at the heart of nuclear power plants and are critical to their operation. Until now, there have been two ways to source them. A supplier’s monolithic, ‘out-of-the-box’ safety system might be purchased, with operators having a constrained ability to customize it to their specific needs. Alternatively, an entirely bespoke approach might be taken, with internal teams or partners expending a large amount of time and money to deliver a unique system that meets every requirement.
With Guardline, we can offer a different way to acquire a safety system that delivers the benefits of the two established methods without their drawbacks.
As with an ‘out-of-the-box’ solution our platform is pre-designed to work as a single technological unit. However, we take the opposite to a monolithic approach. Guardline is built from a wide range of individual modules with different characteristics. Each is pre-qualified and mutually compatible with the rest of the range. This means modules can be rapidly selected and assembled to deliver functional units. These units are then interconnected to complete the system. The high level of choice and seamless interoperability of Guardline makes the platform extremely customizable, ensuring a vast range of customer-specific requirements can be rapidly met.
A good way to visualize it is Lego bricks. Each brick does a certain job and is compatible with all other Lego bricks. A brick can be combined with any other brick quickly and effectively to create the desired outcome, perhaps a great spaceship.
The platform we’re launching next week is the evolved outcome of our nearly seven decades experience developing I&C technology for nuclear power plants. In the UK Advanced Gas Reactor fleet alone, our I&C systems have given more than 10 million hours of operational use. The concept underpinning all those systems is recognizably Guardline, even if the technology wasn’t delivered under that name and didn’t benefit from the huge range of modules that we can now offer.
We expect Guardline’s power to deliver custom solutions will be welcomed by operators looking to replace legacy systems in operational plants, as well developers of traditional, next generation and small modular reactors. Due to its inherent flexibility, final Guardline systems are likely to fulfil a wide range of safety applications within nuclear power plants, from primary protection, diverse protection, post accident monitoring and priority logic through to diesel generator management.
We could talk in great depth about the technical specifications underpinning Guardline’s performance but this short blog post is not the place. If you want to find out more, look out for our announcements at ANS UWC or download our Guardline brochure.