On the retrievability and control of design basis information

For several years, the nuclear industry has been attempting to sustain an effective configuration management program for the nation's operating nuclear power plants. Design basis information retrievability and control have become the stumbling blocks for nuclear utilities to survive recent Nuclear Regulatory Commission safety system functional and outage modifications inspections. As a result, utilities have been forced to initiate costly programs for retrieving their plants' design basis information in order to generate verified and controlled plant system design basis documents. Several of these programs are being initiated without a proper linkage to an overall plant configuration program. An approach was adopted that incorporates an integrated configuration management model that clearly separates design basis information from design information. Figure 1 shows the basic elements of the model. The model links design basis information with the other major configuration management information elements and illustrates the importance of such a linkage from both the control of changes and the value added viewpoints. The value added stems from the fact that a single retrievability effort combined with a once-through information screening and data base build up can support the configuration management program as well as design basis reconstitution program with no significant increase in cost