News

RTP meets aggressive outage schedule June 12, 2003

POMPANO BEACH, Fla.- June 2, 2003 The schedule for the Plant Process Computer (PPC) replacement at the Exelon-LaSalle Nuclear Plant Unit 2 was aggressive: a mere thirteen months between award of the prime contract to the system integrator to the resumption of full power after a 21 day installation outage. Few if any complete PPC replacements have been scheduled or implemented in such a short time. An RTP Hybrid Control System provided the platform on which the plant PPC and BOP applications were successfully implemented on schedule.

A project team headed by SCIENTECH, Inc. of Idaho Falls, ID provided the hardware, software and system integration. Exelon Corporate Information Technology Division, LaSalle County Station Project Management, Exelon Design Engineering, and LaSalle Station Information Technology staff members all made significant contributions.

RTP furnished all data acquisition system (DAS) hardware and cabling for use by the project’s system integrator. Existing plant systems and requirements mandated the development of a specially designed 160mv input card to support installed instrumentation. RTP also designed plant-specific cabling to eliminate signal retermination, to speed installation and to reduce outage schedule risk. The RTP 2000-based hybrid control system scans approximately 750 analog and 1,250 digital instrumentation points every 100 milliseconds. The system’s total point count is approximately 2,100 analogs and 2,000 digitals. Of the digital points, approximately 250 are configured as Sequence Of Events (SOE) points and time-stamped at a one-millisecond resolution.

Work on the LaSalle County Unit 1 PPC/DAS/ECP replacement is ongoing and scheduled to be completed during the first quarter of 2004.

Sal Provanzano, president and CEO of RTP Corporation, said, “RTP is extremely proud of our contribution to this record-setting effort. All the organizations involved deserve special recognition for the cooperation that was required to accomplish this task. RTP looks forward to being Exelon’s hardware supplier for future projects.”