Fleet chemistry performance: EPRI chemistry monitoring and assessment status - T05-051

Water chemistry control is an effective method for mitigating reactor coolant system corrosion, maintaining fuel performance integrity and managing radiation fields. Recognizing the high importance of water chemistry on these areas, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) established the Chemistry Monitoring and Assessment (CMA) database to collect impactful parameters. Monitoring of relevant parameters during plant operation (at power, during transients, and when in outage) is important to adequately protect primary system and balance of plant components. EPRI's CMA program collects chemistry program information and operational data from participating member utilities into a single-source relational database. Plant data are collated and verified prior to upload into the database on a routine frequency. The curated data is used throughout EPRI's efforts to support research, to assist plants in resolving challenges, to enable plants to perform benchmarking, and to form a basis for developing technical guidance. Through the recently introduced web interface, the database is now available for direct benchmarking to participating member utilities. The benefit lies in the ability to directly learn from the experience of other plants in the industry by the collective sharing of experience data through the CMA. The insights identified from the web interface can be utilized to trend, correlate, and improve plant operations, meet key industry initiatives and metrics, and support the development of plant-specific operating plans. Maintaining chemistry parameters within the limits as provided in the EPRI guidance is key to optimization of chemistry control. This paper presents a status of the CMA, its uses as a benchmarking and research tool, and the status of important coolant chemistry trends. (authors)