The Overview in Safety Review of Human Factors Engineering and Control Room Design in Chinese AP1000 Nuclear Power Plant

Abstract

The first AP1000 nuclear power plant is constructed in SanMen county in Zhejiang Province in China, which has creative and distinctive design characteristics. Human factors engineering disciplines are applied to the design of the AP1000. In addition to the elements of the program review model, the minimum inventory of controls, displays, and alarms present in the main control room and at the remote shutdown workstation. These contents mentioned above are reviewed according to standards, rules and regulations. This article introduces review process and several important issues during the reviewing process. These issues include many elements, such as operating experience review, task analysis, human system interface design, verification and validation, and so on. This paper emphasizes on the main control room design (including environment and layout). Background noise in the actual main control room may exceed too much to design value. Another important issue is about main control room habitability systems (VES) changes to satisfy post-actuation performance requirements in AP1000 design change proposal. All the wall panel displays will be closed in this design change proposal. Review process and proposal are described in the paper. Since the AP1000 unit in China is the first constructed all over the world, verification and validation are especially important and necessary. The plan of verification and validation, the results summary report of verification and validation, the report of human engineering discrepancies are focus attention. Verification and validation in human factors engineering include HSI task support verification, HFE design verification and integrated system validation. This paper introduces the review process of verification and validation, the issues found in verification and validation.