International Collaboration in the Development of NPP Software

In this paper, we first review the progress and current status of international collaboration and technical exchange in the development of nuclear power plant (NPP) software by The State Nuclear Power Software Development Center (SNPSDC) in China. Then we discuss the importance of the international collaboration and exchange in the trend of globalisation of NPP technology. We also identify the role and contribution of professional women in this process. SNPSDC, the first professional software development centre for NPP in China, has been developing COSINE — a self-reliance NPP design and analysis software product with China brand—since 2010. Through participating in OECD/NEA's joint projects, such as ROSA-2 Project, PKL–3 Project, HYMERES Project and ATLAS Project, SNPSDC shared data with other countries involved with respect to particular areas, such as high quality reactor thermal hydraulics test data. SNPSDC's engineers have also been actively participating in international technical and research exchange for presenting their innovative work to the community while learning from peers. Our record shows that over 30 papers have been presented in international conferences with respect to nuclear reactor thermal hydraulics, safety analysis, reactor physics and software engineering within the past 4 years. The above international collaboration and technical exchange helped SNPSDC's engineers to keep up with the state-of-art technology in this field. The large amount of valuable experimental data transferred to SNPSDC ensured the functionality, usability and reliability of software while greatly reduced the cost and shortened the cycle of development. Female engineers and other employees of SNPSDC either drove or got actively involved in a lot of aspects of the above collaboration and exchange, such as technical communication, business negotiation and overseas affairs management. These professional women played an irreplaceable role in this project by their carefulness, patience and flexibleness. (author)