Nuclear Plant Wireless Communications

Faced with challenging radio frequency (RF) characteristics, physical access restrictions, and extreme environmental conditions, deployment of reliable wireless systems into the nuclear plant environment represents a tremendous challenge for (I&C) instrumentation communications engineers.

SAICs approach to wireless infrastructure design and deployment enable the nuclear power plant operator to leverage a robust, ubiquitous, multiservice network for day-to-day operations and to facilitate implementation of efficient operations processes that minimize plant outage durations and optimize overall plant operations.

Wireless Design — Understanding the Challenge

Designing a reliable, highly available wireless infrastructure in the nuclear environment represents a unique challenge for RF and network engineers. RF challenges abound: Facility designs and construction materials are highly variable with both large, wide open, multi-story spaces and numerous small rooms and long hallways packed with equipment and piping. In addition, there are large — sometimes remote — outdoor areas including lay-down pads, cooling lakes, switchyards, and office outbuildings. In addition to the fundamental RF challenges presented, network design is further driven by the inherent constraints associated with a facility's restricted areas, radiation protection zones and containment areas. These factors necessitate a thorough and thoughtful RF design approach to help ensure that desired performance and system availability is achieved from a coverage and network capacity perspective.

SAIC has extensive experience and expertise in addressing the challenges of RF and network design in the nuclear plant environment. We utilize RF design best practices and proven tools in the hands of a highly specialized engineering team to carefully define functional and technical requirements, model wireless propagation, and develop network capacity and integration plans. Realization of this approach ensures that the correct wireless network is designed to provide the right amount of network capacity, where you need it.

Ubiquitous Coverage — Inside and Out

SAIC recognizes that nuclear plant operations are not confined solely to indoor areas, but also include large outdoor areas surrounding the facility, and can, in fact, extend far beyond the main facility to remote locations, including water intake facilities, firing ranges and lake testing facilities.

SAIC has deep expertise in integrating and deploying multiple technology types to achieve the ubiquitous coverage required to seamlessly deliver voice, video, and data services throughout the plant environment. Among the technologies in SAIC's technology toolkit are:

• Indoor and outdoor standard and mesh configured Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n)
• Worldwide Inteeroperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) (802.16e) and proprietary point-to-multipoint variants
• 3G/4G cellular services including long-term evolution (LTE)
• Industrial wireless/supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) wireless technologies (802.15.4, ZigBee®, HART®, On-Ramp*; and other proprietary instrumentation and control solutions)

Deployment of these technologies in an integrated environment creates a common, secure voice, video and data network infrastructure that can be leveraged by all operations within the plant from operations and engineering to facility security, to training and administration.

Optimizing Deployment

One of the key cost drivers in any nuclear plant environment is the frequent requirement for facility engineering and construction modifications. SAIC's design team uses our wealth of experience in the industry with a conscious goal of designing a solution that minimizes the need for facility modifications, dramatically reducing overall engineering complexity, deployment cost and overall project duration. When modifications are required, SAIC engineering and program management staff work aggressively with plant engineering to assess and issue modifications — or adjust network design — to meet technical, schedule, and budget goals.

Assuring Service and Security

SAIC integrated network solutions are designed to provide a high level of service and quality demanded by critical infrastructure applications in the nuclear environment. SAIC accomplishes this through detailed requirements definition, application mapping and capacity planning. Once deployed, service availability and throughput thresholds levels are empirically verified and tested prior to final commissioning into a live production environment. The result is a network infrastructure that operations and engineering can count on in any operational condition.

Helping to ensure comprehensive network and information security is another key, yet often overlooked element of effective network design. SAIC has a rich pedigree in network and cybersecurity and our security engineers have specific experience and a detailed understanding of the specific controls necessary to thoroughly and effectively secure wireless and wired network systems for the nuclear environment. SAIC's cybersecurity approach is comprehensive and applied at the system level (people, processes and tools) to assure compliance with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST®) 800-53 framework and Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI®) 08-09 compliance mandates.

Enabling New Applications and Operational Capabilities — Today and Tomorrow

Ongoing advancements in broadband network communications have created an entirely new vision of the potential for nuclear operations. This evolving landscape is driving new operational models leveraging real-time data management, communications, and collaboration across the plant environment. SAIC integrated network solutions can provide nuclear plant operators with a robust and reliable network infrastructure that is capable of supporting a broad variety of applications, including:

Day-to-Day Plant Operation:

• Wirelessly enabled, centrally managed personal dosimetry provides real-time status and analytics
• Leverage ubiquitous coverage to enable new data gathering, instrumentation and control technologies
• Deploy mobile computing platforms to collect maintenance and quality assurance status metrics from across the site
• Enable full duplex voice over Internet (VOIP) wireless communications between staff throughout the facility with private branch exchange (PBX) integration
• Establish connectivity to remote site areas, including fence perimeters, pipeline valves, intake facilities and other remote critical digital assets.

Outage Management Enhancement:

• Location-based services provide granular personnel tracking for radiation protection, safety and outage resource management and enhanced asset management capability
• Leverage improved surveillance capability to monitor work package progress, collaborate from a central outage management center in real time, and conduct remote inspection using fixed or portable audio and video
• Mobile computing capability allows remote access to documentation repositories, real-time work-package status information, and workflow distribution.

Success Starts Today

As operators continue to manage the world's aging nuclear fleet, they are turning more and more to new, advanced technologies and applications to promote safety, security, and improved operational efficiency. SAIC is a world leader in critical infrastructure communications and security and has the capability and strong desire to work with operators to design and deploy the critical network solutions required to assure continued success. SAIC's decades of experience in high technology and communications combined with our nuclear-specific communications infrastructure expertise enable us to tackle the nuclear plant environment's toughest communications challenges.

ZigBee is a registered trademark of ZigBee Alliance in the U.S. and/or other countries. HART is a registered trademark of HART Communication Foundation in the U.S. and/or other countries.
* On-Ramp is On-Ramp Wireless, Inc.