Bruce Power, a private nuclear generator of electricity, was already using conventional CCTV equipment for operations and security. But it was stuck with old technology — thanks to a heavily regulated industry and the inability to add new cameras in its existing vaults. But it had a tall order for its future requirements: high-quality video, at 30 images per second per camera, and thousands of cameras with hundreds of operators.

The company, which took over the site on the shores of Lake Huron from Ontario Hydro in 2001, controls eight CANDU nuclear reactors. Each reactor is located inside a concrete vault that is 100 feet long, 50 feet high and nearly 100 feet wide, with walls that are six feet thick. The only way to get signals in and out of the vault is through what is referred to as “cable penetration,” where the cables literally penetrate through the concrete wall.

Many of the penetrations, designed years ago, were already at maximum capacity. And since the nuclear industry is heavily regulated, Bruce Power was unable to make any changes to those structures without extensive engineering studies and certifications.

“You just can’t run some cabling from here to there to set up a camera network,” says Steve Cannon, manager of investor and media relations with Bruce Power.

The company worked with partner Intercon Security to come up with a solution which would combine traditional analogue cameras with newer IP technology. “This was done very carefully, and through a whole series of regulations.”

Bruce Power faced a number of challenges, says Andrew Young, senior sales executive of national and enterprise solutions with Intercon.

When the vaults were originally designed, no one thought there would be any need for additional communications infrastructure. But technology evolved, and stakeholders wanted to have more information from inside the vaults. “They wanted to put more cameras in there but they couldn’t because they had no cables,” says Young.

All kinds of instrumentation are run through the cable penetrations. “You can only have a few holes punched into that for obvious safety reasons,” says Cannon. “I think the creativity and the challenge here is finding ways to use the penetrations that were already there in a way that would satisfy our business needs and our regulators.”

Intercon suggested that Bruce Power put in single-mode fibre, which would provide massive bandwidth into the vaults. “We weren’t just thinking video,” says Young. Rather than looking at audio, video and data as separate entities, it took a network-based approach, so anything running over that network simply becomes data. While Intercon designed the system, it hasn’t done any installation work due to regulatory reasons, Bruce Power has its own installation technicians on site.

The project consists of a CCTV system in each of the eight vaults. Multi-strand, single-node fibre optic ribbon cable is being installed in each penetration, which will combine analogue infrastructure with IP connectivity. It’s using Panasonic WJ-GX series encoders and decoders with the Panasonic WJ-SX850 Matrix, as well as Cisco Ether Channel technology that provides up to 8 Gbps (Gigabits per second) communications over the fibre optic cabling. Up to 32 live video feeds are accommodated on each fibre, with 30 frames per second.

The cameras provide Bruce Power with the ability to target individual pieces of equipment. “It’s not a place you can go into easily to monitor equipment,” says Cannon.

Bruce Power is responsible for controlling radiation — there are industry standards for the amount of radiation the general public is allowed to receive over the course of a year, as well as stringent guidelines as to how much radiation that nuclear energy workers are exposed to.

“Our first responsibility is the safety of the environment, of our people, of the plant itself,” says Cannon. You’ll find that the safest generating stations in the world are also the most economically profitable — you can’t separate the two.” When workers go into a vault to do maintenance, the cameras allow a supervisor or co-worker to watch the work that’s being done and see what needs to be done next. This is based on an industry concept referred to as ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable). “You plan out your work so the workers can do it efficiently with the minimum amount of nuclear exposure,” says Cannon. “You don’t even have to be in the room — you can monitor it through the camera system. That plays perfectly into that whole ALARA principle.”

It also helps provide early detection of any maintenance issues that might arise within the vaults. Bruce Power has an extensive program of predictive maintenance, and the CCTV system is another tool that allows workers to see if anything breaks, needs replacing or is coming to the end of its life.

“In most organizations micro-management is seen as a bad thing,” says Young. “Inside a nuclear vault, micro-management is a wonderful thing. You can literally have four or five people looking at what one person is doing.”
There are up to 70 cameras inside each vault, which allow workers to see almost every squar-inch of the vault. There are also numerous cameras outside the vaults, monitored and controlled by various workstations. An outage control centre runs and monitors the outage progress.

“Our security group is going to be taking advantage of the infrastructure that’s here to continue on with more of their initiatives,” says Chris Barnes, director of CCTV for Bruce Power. “To be able to bring video anywhere, any place, or cameras to any location at will, is a big advantage.”

In the past, Bruce Power used a pure analogue system, before moving to a hybrid one. “When you run pure analogue that means you have a mountain of wiring,” he says. “Logistically, it becomes so much work — for every camera you need to run cabling.” Now, he can break the system out into small sections using encoders, which not only provides more flexibility, but also boosts reliability and redundancy.

The project also serves as a means of future-proofing its infrastructure. The next evolution in technology, says Barnes, will be when there’s no need for encoders and decoders. This will allow Bruce Power to mix and match cameras and do virtually anything it wants with the system.

“We’ll probably be exceeding broadcast quality as time goes on because we’re getting into mega-pixel cameras,” he says. “There’s probably no reason why we can’t go to high-def cameras.”
At the moment, though, there are still some limitations with IP. “Seven years ago when we started down this path we knew that IP was going to gather steam,” says Young. “And it has.” But the thing about IP that a lot of people don’t take into account is that it’s difficult to get live, real-time video from hundreds of cameras without reducing quality.

The design parameter Intercon has been working with is to provide DVD quality using MPEG-2 live audio and video on every camera. Some of the cameras on site are analogue, but any camera inside of the vault comes out in a digital IP format.

Intercon also established network nodes, so if Bruce Power wants to put a camera in the middle of nowhere they don’t have to run the cable back to the operations centre — they simply run it to the closest network node. If the security department or the operations department wants to make use of the system, it doesn’t matter, Through partitioning, they can co-exist on the same system without affecting each other.

The system capacity has just exceeded 8,000 cameras. “They don’t have 8,000 cameras on there and they may never get to that number,” says Young. “But it means that will never be the roadblock.”

Vawn Himmelsbach is a Toronto-based freelance writer.