Do you know about GSE’s consulting & training services?

Between GSE’s existing Hyperspring subsidiary and Absolute Consulting, acquired in September of 2017, we now have over 300 individuals that specialize in supporting a variety of activities across the energy industry.

Our comprehensive set of capabilities include:

• Training – including program development, turnkey courses and INPO Certified Instructors
• Procedures – including assessing, writing, controls and certifications
• Engineering – of all varieties
• QA/QC
• Corrective Action – including investigation, root cause evaluation and response
• Project Support – including project management, project and work controls, outage support
• Licensing – including maintaining license basis, evaluations, response, tech specs
• Dry Cask Storage & Decommissioning – including technology evaluation

Whether full-time or temporary, our expert staff can step in at any stage of your project to complete the task at hand.

For the nuclear industry, the issue is “Delivering the Nuclear Promise” while others are faced with unique challenges in acquiring qualified talent and meeting ever shrinking budgets. Our goal is to help you succeed with those competing priorities.

Contact us to learn more.

Current electrical modeling projects demonstrate need for high-fidelity

With three ongoing electrical model upgrade projects, GSE is seeing a trend with US nuclear plants moving away from the simplified electrical models of the past.

All of the current and recent electrical model upgrades we’ve completed are the result of a need for higher fidelity electrical models in the simulator.

This is driven by a couple of factors:

• The magnitude of the Fukushima event uncovered a need for additional electrical power capabilities. As a result of that, plants are installing new FLEX equipment which needs to be incorporated in the simulator.
• Plants are using existing equipment in different ways such as cross connecting busses that previously were not capable of being cross connected or powering existing equipment from alternate power supplies. With existing equipment adopting upgraded or modified controls, startup and trip profile changes occur on the electrical end which cannot accurately be modeled with the current simplified electrical models.
• Procedures are being modified or created to perform evolutions in the plant, such as stripping an entire train of DC power to conserve battery power to allow extended coping times, which was not possible with existing simplified models. An updated, high-fidelity electric model provides realistic indications, giving operators confidence that what they are seeing accurately represents the actual plant response to these off normal conditions.

Upgrading the simulator’s electrical model will allow operators to train for additional off normal events including extended loss of offsite power. Additionally, the fine granularity of bus loading and load distribution will allow plant evolutions, such as battery cross connecting and preservation, that was previously impossible on the simplified models.

The current electrical modeling projects are scheduled to be ready for training in 2018.

Check out our blog, “Is your simulator’s electrical model meeting industry standards?”, for a closer look at four industry events / directives that are shaping new simulator functionality for electrical modeling.

Our team of electrical modeling engineers have a combined 65 years of experience. Contact us today to inquire about updating your electrical models.

Customers seeing value in maintenance contracts

Nearly 60 customers are taking advantage of GSE’s annual software maintenance program.

This program keeps our clients current with technology changes such as operating systems, as well as updated with the latest features and benefits of our software tools and products.

Our EnVision customers are seeing the value of our latest releases, including the following:

• Grey scale display
• Alarm prioritization
• Flare monitor
• User trends
• MP4 based tutorials
• Discounted access to EnVision-On-Demand, our new cloud-based delivery platform. Learn more in this
  30 second video.

JADE users have realized the benefits of:

• Integrated JTools approach
• Drawing comparisons
• Link-on-Link features
• Latest release of JADE 4.5.1 (see details in article below)
• Soon-to-be released JADE 5.0

Contact us to see what our software maintenance program can do for you.

New Simulation Software Release — JADE 4.5.1

JOS ‘send to trend’ feature

The latest patch release for JADE includes several quality of life improvements for the Instructor and Operator Stations and more.

New functions and improvements include:

• Installer Auto Updates
  Reduce the effort required to update your existing JADE to the latest version while maintaining your customizations and project files. Future updates will be a breeze!
• Send to Trend
  Operator stations can now trend simulation variables by simply right clicking on an object in the analog or digital HMI display. Trend the level of a tank and control valve position or heat exchanger inlet and outlet temperatures to monitor changes in the system over time. This new feature makes trending simple!
• JOS performance improvements
  Navigating between HMI displays using the JADE Operator Station (JOS) is now significantly faster. How much faster you ask? In our benchmark test, pages loaded 89% faster!

Stay tuned for more information on JADE / SimExec 5.0.

Contact us for more information.

Industry Insight: The state of Advanced Reactor/SMR technology

Exciting developments in the advanced reactor community continue to come! X-Energy, Terrestrial Energy, Kairos Power, GE Hitachi, Westinghouse, General Atomics, TerraPower and a dozen more companies have presented their design philosophies and progress toward realizing the dream of inherently safe, economically feasible nuclear power within the next 10-15 years.

The Department of Energy and the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission continue with their public support of these initiatives, and more financial support could be on the horizon. All of the designs will require exciting new developments in the supply chain, centering on new materials and manufacturing techniques, and there are currently pilot projects underway in both areas. There is broad industry/government cooperation at this point in advancing the technologies towards the realization of these goals.

With the DOE’s help, there are now three working groups under the Advanced Reactor banner, Molten Salt Reactors, High Temperature Gas Reactors and Fast Reactors, and these groups have experienced great success so far. There is also a lot of interest among the international community, as Canada, the United Kingdom and China all have programs up and running with the intention of licensing advanced reactor technology in their country. Momentum continues to build towards the goal and the public/private partnerships being envisioned will bring these plants to fruition.

Contact us for more information.

Subsidiary, Absolute Consulting, Inc. offering public Procedure Professionals Association (PPA) certification course.