IEC/IEEE 60780-323™ Standard Proposes Safety Requirements for Qualifying Equipment for Nuclear Power Facilities Around the World

PISCATAWAY, N.J., USA, 17 March 2016 – IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, today announced the approval of IEC/IEEE 60780-323™-2016, Nuclear Facilities – Electrical Equipment Important to Safety – Qualification. The standard jointly developed by IEEE and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is intended to propose globally consistent principles, methods and procedures for cost-effectively qualifying the safety of electrical equipment that is deployed in nuclear facilities around the world.

Approval of IEC/IEEE 60780-323 by both IEC and IEEE should be a major step toward standards-based compliance with a single, uniform set of qualification requirements, said John White, chair of IEEE Working Group 2.1 on Equipment Qualification. Designing a nuclear power plant is obviously a major undertaking. Industry consolidation around a systematic, globally consistent way of qualifying the equipment for a plant stands to reduce complexity, costs and cycles throughout the process and eliminate the burden on manufacturers to prove their compliance to disparate requirements of individual buyers around the world.

Work to harmonize separate IEC and IEEE standards into a single, globally accepted standard began in 2010, in order to make qualification simpler and most cost-effective for manufacturers and nuclear facilities around the world. The qualification requirements in IEC/IEEE 60780-323 are intended, when met, to demonstrate and document the safety of electrical equipment under applicable service conditions and to reduce the risk of environmentally induced, common-cause equipment failure.

IEEE is striving to make important contributions to nuclear safety worldwide by aligning the global nuclear industry around a consistent, repeatable process to help ensure the safety of electrical equipment, said Konstantinos Karachalios, managing director, IEEE SA. In addition to jointly approving this standard with the IEC, we are facilitating collaboration among device manufacturers, test laboratories and end-user power plants around development of a program for certifying standards compliance.

It is expected that the newly combined IEC/IEEE 60780-323 will be adopted as a European Norm for mandatory application throughout the European Union member states.

The IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) Nuclear Power Engineering Committee (NPEC) and IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) Conformity Assessment Program (ICAP) have been exploring development of a program to certify compliance to IEC/IEEE 60780-323 and other related, globally leveraged IEEE standards. For more information on ICAP, please visit standards-qa21.ieee.org/icap.

Visit the IEC/IEEE 60780-323 Standard for more information.

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