Chin Shan is owned by Taiwan Power Company (Taipower), and started commercial operation in 1978 (Chin Shan 1) and 1979 (Chin Shan 2). It employs over 400 people, and is planned to operate until 2018 (unit 1) and 2019 (unit 2).
General Electric reactors
The reactors for Chin Shan 1 and 2 were supplied by General Electric, with a steam generator from Westinghouse Electric Corp. Ebasco was the main architect engineer, and construction was by Taiwan Power.
Upgrades were performed in 1989, when Alstom provided a fabric filter for the low-radioactive-waste incinerator. In 2005, GE Energy was awarded a multi-million-dollar contract to upgrade monitoring and control systems. And, most recently in 2008, Areva is providing the new fuel assemblies.
New fuel assemblies for Chin Shan
The new Areva fuel assemblies include five firm reload batches and three optional reload batches for each unit. Areva will provide core monitoring system assistance in addition to the fabrication service, reload fuel design, licensing analysis, and operation support. The contract spans more than 12 years.
Areva offered a fuel design based on the Atrium-10A model it is currently supplying to Taipower, with its latest generation Atrium-10XM as an optional design for the future. The company is also providing boiling water reactor fuel assemblies for the Kuosheng nuclear power plant.
BWR vessel inspection used navigator scanner
ABB brought an innovative solution to reactor vessel in-service inspections (ISIs), which are required every ten years. The ISI monitors any changes since the previous inspection to confirm the continued integrity of the reactor pressure boundary. It is performed in situ, and so has significant physical access restrictions. In both Chin Shan units, for example, access to the vessel is obstructed by mirror insulation, leaving a minimum gap of 7in (18cm) to perform the inspection.”The 1,208MW Chin Shan nuclear power plant has two 604MWe boiling water reactors.”
ABB AMDATA’s Navigator Scanner solves the problem with automated imaging. The system’s first field use was in the second ten-year ISI of Chin Shan’s BWR reactor vessels. The inspections detected previously unobserved manufacturing flaws using simultaneous ultrasonic and eddy current imaging. ABB NDE Services, a division of ABB Combustion Engineering Nuclear Power (CENP), provided the field service using a UNIX RISC based IntraSpect imaging system. Both IntraSpect and Navigator are provided by ABB AMDATA, another division of ABB CENP.
The inspection ultrasonically examined both a circumferential and longitudinal weld in its beltline region, requiring a minimum of 90% coverage of each weld. The inspection of unit 2 was completed in November 1997. ABB was then also contracted to perform the ISI of Chin Shan unit 1 at its next outage.
Optibase streaming media systems
In 2003, Optibase supplied a streaming media system to deliver live video content to over 400 of the plant’s employees. The system was installed to improve internal communications and provide information on weather forecasts and power cuts, along with advertorial and training. Chin Shan worked with CDRPro, Optibase’s partner in Taiwan for system integration. It chose a solution based on Optibase’s MGW 2000 streaming server and InfoValue’s QuickVideo software.
The QuickVideo Multicast software package delivers TV-like video broadcasts to PCs and set-top boxes using standard IP multicast technology. In the Chin Shan project, QuickVideo Multicast controls six live MPEG-2 streams encoded at 6Mbps.
