Synergistic Use of IEEE and IEC Nuclear Power Plant Standards

Abstract

Many organizations worldwide develop standards that affect nuclear instrumentation and control (I and C). Two of the primary standards organizations are the US IEEE's Nuclear Power Engineering Committee (NPEC), and the IEC subcommittee on Reactor Instrumentation (SC45A). This paper surveys the contents of the two sets of standards. Opportunities for complementary use of IEEE and IEC standards are discussed. The collections of IEEE. and IEC standards have some overlap, but in many cases cover significantly different topics. For example, IEEE standards go to great depth on environmental qualification of many specific types of components, while IEC covers the topic only at the general level. Conversely, certain IEC standards deal with specific instrumentation and control functions, a topic area where IEEE standards are largely mute. This paper considers how the two sets of standards may be used in a complementary fashion to achieve broader topic coverage than is possible using only one or the other standard suite. To understand the similarities and differences between IEC and IEEE nuclear standards layer diagrams were developed for each set of standards. Another paper [Johnson, 2001] used the same layer diagrams to investigate where coordination between the two sets of standards is most critical.