We have worked from  2009 to 2013 with Schneider Electric on the commissioning of the industrial “Command and Control Network”, for technical assistance and on site acceptance tests for the Areva’s uranium enrichment plant named “Georges Besse II” since august 2009.

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“Georges Besse II” (Tricastin / Drôme) is the new site of Areva’s uranium enrichment plant. The first two parts of this enrichment project was officially launched in May 2009 by the Prime Minister.

The centrifugation process that develops Areva succeeds the gaseous diffusion process applied during 30 years to enrich uranium on the Eurodif nearby unit, also named “Georges Besse I”, the name of its first owner. …

At the Tricastin, the transfer will take place over seven years. The so-called “south” of GB II unit  began commercial production in April 2011, pending the north unit, then the stopping of GB I. All with the same production: enough to power a hundred reactors. First benefit with this new technology, it consumes 50 times less energy than the previous technique.

source : UsineNouvelle.com…

With a total cost of 3 billion euros, the Georges Besse II plant is one of the largest French industrial investments of the decade

Construction, facts and figures : more than 50 major contractors, more than 600 workers on site (excluding project owner and architect engineer) and most orders are placed with local and regional companies.

The uranium production of this highly sensitive and secure area is monitored by a huge control system build with around 400 Hirschmann’s switches and around 400 Schneider Electric’s PLCs divided into 8 parts. Each part is, essentially, a ring network securely coupled to a main ring and built with 50 switches and 50 PLCs. It includes, security features with dedicated passwords, vlans, routing, content filtering and SNMP management.

Securing the network was implemented in 2013 and it has been particularly complex to conduct this mission because all security features were implemented during the normal operation of the uranium enrichment and without a production’s stop.