Going virtual

摘要

Digital information is now so pervasive that it can come as a surprise to realise that many of the western world's nuclear plants were designed before the computer age or, at least, with relatively primitive early software tools. This issue becomes a critical problem when operating licence renewals approach or when major upgrades are required. Current regulatory requirements demand very high levels of information integrity and it is not unusual for this to impose extensive reverse engineering to bring legacy plant information up to these higher standards.rnIn an ideal world, an entire plant would have a complete, accurate and fully-detailed 'digital plant' counterpart, enabling modern engineering IT solutions to be applied to its operation and maintenance.