Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy's ‘Development of Decommissioning Engineering Platform Based on 3D Plant Model' Project Wins 2014 Bentley Be Inspired Award

United Arab Emirates, Dubai – 24 May 2015 – Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the leading company dedicated to providing comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure, today announced that Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy, Ltd.’s project “Development of Decommissioning Engineering Platform Based on 3D Plant Model” has won a 2014 Be Inspired Award. The project won in the “Innovation in Power Generation” category. The 2014 Be Inspired Awards winners were selected by nine independent panels of jurors comprising distinguished industry experts. The awards honor the extraordinary work of Bentley users improving and sustaining the world’s infrastructure, recognizing outstanding and innovative project achievements in infrastructure design, construction, and operations.

The Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy project was prompted by the Japanese government’s decision to decommission all nuclear reactors that are more than 40 years old. By the 2040s, decommissioning will peak at more than 50 percent of Japan’s domestic plants.

Decommissioning nuclear power plants takes as many as several thousand workers, 10 years, and a cost of JPY 36 to 77 billion per reactor. The objective of the project was to accurately calculate the amount of waste materials that must be managed as radioactive substances for each nuclear power plant. With the help of MicroStation’s 3D modeling capabilities and i-models, the Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy joint venture assessed the radiation dose for workers, the number of man-hours and amount of radioactive waste materials generated from the demolition, demolition procedure data, and residual radioactivity.

Anne-Marie Walters, Bentley industry marketing director, process manufacturing and resources industries, said, “The Be Inspired Awards jurors selected this project for its innovative approach to an extreme engineering challenge – an approach that fully leveraged the ability of i-models to integrate geometric volumes with complex data. The jurors commended the Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy team for carefully and methodically thinking through the disassembly process of nuclear plants and changing the approach from the traditional consideration of plant weight to the consideration of plant volume. This enabled the team to take into account the radiation dose rate from each part of the plant. The team was then able to develop a safe, rational, and cost-effective approach to decommissioning Japan’s aging nuclear power plants. On behalf of my colleagues at Bentley, I congratulate Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy on these extraordinary accomplishments.”

Masato Oura, Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy, Ltd., Nuclear Power Business Development & Management Division, chief project manager, said, “In the future, a number of Japan’s nuclear power plants will begin to exceed the 40-year maximum operating life established by the government and, therefore, will need to be decommissioned. In preparation for this monumental task, we need to accurately estimate the safety of the decommissioning process, the amount of radioactive waste material that will need to be managed during each decommissioning, and the cost involved. This project enabled us to prove an approach that accurately estimates the amount of radioactive material involved by converting data from Hitachi-GE’s own CAD system, in conjunction with a customization of Bentley’s MicroStation 3D information modeling system and i-models. As a result of the project’s tremendous success, we would like to promote the further use and development of this system.”