Nuclear Civil Engineering Towards the Simplification and Digitalisation

Further to the climate change summit COP21 organized in Paris, France in December 2015, nearly 200 governments have committed to cut the emission of greenhouse gases and to limit global warming to well below 2 °C by the end of the Century. Nuclear, low-carbon energy, is perfectly integrated within the universal energy mix plan. It is one of best solutions for guaranteeing energy production increases to meet growing demand and protection of the environment. In order to sustainably develop nuclear energy industry, the challenges of new build nuclear power plants (NPP) are to permanently ensure the highest levels of quality, security and safety as well as to optimize the project planning and economy. Therefore, it is important to study and to develop innovative concepts, technologies and methodologies, and to improve the process for the nuclear civil engineering. Based on the simplification and the digitalisation, numerous important measures have been undertaken throughout the design of Hinkley Point C (HPC) NNP in Sumerset, UK. The paper consists of reviewing and analyzing some of them such as: the simplification of structural construction, the balance of use of pre-cast structures, the 3D reinforcement modeling method, the 4D modeling for project management and the improving of design processes. They allow optimizing the design, facilitating the calculations and analysis, and reinforcing the design robustness, anticipating any execution difficulties, minimising the interfaces and reducing the overall design time. A simple, quality and robust design contributes to shorten the construction period, to optimise the time-schedule and to improve the quality, security and safety of the construction as well as significantly reduce the cost and the impacts of construction to the environment. As a result, several perspectives of innovations for the future such as improvement of Building Information Modeling (BIM) applications for the project management will be also introduced.