Project description
Updating European nuclear safety methodologies in light of new risks
Nuclear power plants can produce cost-effective and emission-free electricity around the clock. About a quarter of all electricity and half of the low-carbon electricity in the EU is currently generated with nuclear energy, and increasing its contribution is good for the planet and for its citizens. Nuclear safety is an EU priority, and the EU-funded R2CA project is supporting this with an eye on both operating and future nuclear power plants. The focus is on developing methods to reassess safety margins considering new risks that may have arisen from the original designs or extensions to them. Based on evaluations, the team is also identifying new accident management measures and technologies to reduce the radiological consequences of emergency situations.
Objective
The Reduction of Radiological Consequences of design basis and extension Accidents (R2CA) project targets the development of harmonized methodologies and innovative management approach and safety devices for the evaluation and for the reduction of the consequences of DBA and DEC-A accidents in operating and foreseen nuclear power plants in Europe. For both purposes development of methodologies will be conducted with the goal of reassessing the safety margins using less conservative approaches and considering the new risks that rose from the original design or design extension phases. This will reinforce the confidence on these safety margins for conditions up to the extended design domain, will allow the identification of new accident management measures and devices and will support the optimization of the potential associated emergency population protection measures.
Improvement of evaluations tools will be supported by the reassessment of the existing experimental and analytical databases. The efficiency of the approach will be demonstrated by comparing at start and then at the end of the project the results of the evaluation of a series of reactor cases selected by a senior expert group among two main categories: loss of coolant accidents and steam generator tube rupture accidents.
Detailed analyzes of these reactor cases simulations will suggest the development of harmonized evaluation methodologies.
The project will include also innovative actions to estimate the pros and cons of potential new accident management measures and devices, to explore the potential switch of prognosis evaluation tools to the diagnosis of on-going fuel cladding failure and to explore the potentiality for these accidental situations of advanced technological fuels.
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
92260 Fontenay Aux Roses
France