How Radiy Supports Industrial Automation Worldwide
Nuclear power plants built in the 1970s and 1980s were designed around analog control systems that, in many cases, are still running today — decades past the technology horizon their original engineers had in mind. Replacing that equipment isn’t optional forever: as components age past their intended service life, operators face a choice between full reactor replacement, life extension, or targeted modernization of the safety-critical systems that monitor and protect the reactor core. Increasingly, operators are choosing the third option, since it’s typically the fastest and least disruptive path to keeping an existing plant compliant with current safety expectations.
A global standard for safety-critical upgrades
The framework for how that modernization is supposed to happen is set out by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s safety standards for instrumentation and control systems, which define requirements for the sensors, protection logic, and diagnostic systems considered “important to safety” in a nuclear plant. The standards aren’t legally binding on any single country, but they function as the closest thing the nuclear industry has to a shared technical baseline, and national regulators in most countries with nuclear programs reference them directly when approving upgrade projects, which is what gives a modernization project done to that standard credibility across borders.
What sets nuclear-grade control systems apart
The broader category of equipment involved — what engineers generally call industrial control systems — covers everything from the programmable logic controllers running a factory assembly line to the reactor protection systems that can automatically shut down a nuclear plant if a monitored parameter crosses a safety threshold. What makes the nuclear-plant version distinct is the redundancy and independent diagnostics built into it: a reactor protection system generally has to keep functioning correctly even if one of its own components fails, a considerably higher bar than most industrial automation is held to. That redundancy requirement is a large part of why nuclear I&C upgrades take longer and cost more than an equivalent factory automation project — the system has to be provably safe under failure conditions, not just functional under normal ones.
One firm’s track record across three countries
Ukraine’s RPC Radiy Kropyvnytskyi is one of the specialist engineering firms operating in this niche. Over the past decade it has carried out reverse-engineering work on watchdog timer boards for reactor emergency protection systems at Canada’s Darlington and Pickering stations, supplied replacement speed sensors for the main circulation pumps at Argentina’s Embalse plant, and developed a reactor control and protection system installed during the modernization of Bulgaria’s Kozloduy plant. Those three projects illustrate the range of what I&C modernization actually covers in practice — from a narrow component-level upgrade to a full protection-system replacement — all falling under the same IAEA-aligned safety framework, and all sharing the same underlying goal: not replacing an entire reactor, but swapping out the aging protection and monitoring layer while the rest of the plant keeps running.
A trend that’s likely to accelerate
Work like this is likely to become more common rather than less. A large share of the world’s roughly 440 operating reactors were built before digital control systems existed at all, and as those plants approach or extend past their original design life, the safety case for keeping them running increasingly depends on whether their protection and monitoring systems have been brought up to current standards — a slower, more incremental process than building a new plant, but in many cases a considerably cheaper one, and one that lets operators avoid the years-long regulatory and construction timeline a new build would require.
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