Participation of Architect-Engineer in the Life Cycle of Nuclear Power Plant: Tools, Opportunities, and Prospects

The established practice of making a decision on the construction of a new nuclear power plant occurs after the approval of the technical and economic requirements for it, taking into account the need to ensure them during the construction process. It is no secret that the most important indicators of technical and economic requirements, such as capital costs and construction time, are currently not kept for almost all nuclear power plant projects. As a rule, this indicates an insufficiently good elaboration of the project, imperfection of the estimated documentation, and management problems during construction. A distinctive feature of the construction of nuclear power plants in the Russian Federation is that the operating organization is at the same time the customer of the project, taking part in ensuring all stages of the life cycle of the nuclear power plant and bearing responsibility for achieving the technical and economic requirements of the project. In this regard, an urgent task is to provide expert support to the project customer from an expert organization capable of independently assessing the quality of the project and the progress of its implementation. The necessity of support of the technical customer’s activity by an expert organization—architect-engineer—is outlined on the basis of positive experience. Taking into account the world practice of designing, building, and operating engineering-complex and capital-intensive projects, it is necessary for the architect-engineer to substantiate a number of optimization measures on the basis of the use of modern methods (requirements management, application of technical, economic, and mathematical models, development and application of digital models and digital twins of nuclear power plants). The necessity of using decision expertise in managing and quality control of nuclear power plant design and construction is substantiated using a technical and economic model and digital twins for new nuclear power plant projects at all stages of their life cycle.