Project Overview
The Oconee Nuclear Station (ONS) operated by Duke Energy is located on Lake Keowee near Seneca, South Carolina, USA. It has an energy output capacity of over 2,500 MWe.
ONS, and the rest of the nuclear industry had a deadline of December 31st 2017, to be fully compliant with the requirements of NEI 08-09. To support this effort, we divided the scope into 19 different EC packages. Multi-unit ECs were developed as master/child ECs to help facilitate timely implementation.
As part of this work there were 19 different Engineering Change (EC) packages. Multi-unit ECs had to be developed as master/child ECs to help facilitate timely implementation.
The ECs included:
- Upgrade for the L3/L3 firewall.
- Removal of network bypasses and separation of shared network equipment.
- Installation of an IRIG-B and NTP clock distribution system using a rubidium oscillator driven clock.
- Firewalls installed to monitor network signals originating outside the PA (ESV, PCS, CMUXs and Video).
- Installation of locks and tie in to the security computer for CDAs outside controlled areas.
- Installation of a new CMUX to facilitated additional points needed and the remediation of the checkpoint barriers.
- Installation of fencing and IDS for the warehouse x-ray units.
- Whitelisting necessary CDAs.
- Collapsing the triple stack unit network switches to a single switch and installation of firewalls for logging and monitoring.
- Head-end and back-end PSCS upgrades and installation of Comprise Monitoring Systems (CMS) to log and alert for the L4 and L3 process network the L4 security network and allow for logs to be gathered by Nuclear Process Systems (NPS) via L2.5 DMZ equipment.
- The CMS also provides applications and centralized management for antivirus, whitelisting, WSUS and other cybersecurity remediation tools.
How We Helped
We provided onsite implementation support as well as provided at least two (2) engineers to monitor and document activities during pre-Factory Assessment Test (FAT) and FAT at the vendor facility.
We were able to successfully overcome aggressive schedules to meet the internal Duke milestone dates and the regulatory deadline. Rapid changes in direction required us to evaluate, plan and execute alternate actions to meet these dates while providing designs that could be installed to meet the deadlines.
There were significant challenges with electrical and heat load margin in the areas we needed to install new equipment. We worked closely with the electrical and mechanical design organizations to determine the most advantageous path forward. This resulted in an EC to replace compact florescent light fixtures with LED fixtures and the replacement of 54 plant computer and business workstations with more efficient models to create margin.
We received positive feedback from the Oconee Cyber and DPS teams for the level of effort shown and the cohesion with the site teams.
