Skip to main content

NRC Proposes Adding Aircraft Impact Assesments to New Reactor Certification Process

By Eric McErlain
Released late yesterday by NRC:
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) today unveiled the third in a series of major steps to enhance the post-Sept. 11 security of nuclear power plants. The agency proposal would require each applicant for a new reactor design to assess how the design, to the extent practicable, can have greater built-in protections to avoid or mitigate the effects of a large commercial aircraft impact, making them even more resistant to an attack.

The Commission emphasized that seeking security assessments and examining how designs can be improved is consistent with the traditional approach the NRC has taken to so-called “beyond design basis events.” These are events with conditions exceeding the stresses imposed by the “design basis event” conditions which require plants to be brought to a safe shutdown. Design basis event conditions include large pipe breaks, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados and floods. Assessing a new reactor design in the early stages can enable modifications or additional features to reduce the need for human intervention in the event of an airplane crash.

The NRC will seek comment from the public, the nuclear industry and the technical community on the proposal. The proposed rule, which will replace an NRC staff proposal, will be available for comment later this year.
NEI spokeman Steve Kerekes passed along the following note in response:
While we've not seen details beyond the news release at this point, the Commission's action strikes us as appropriate. It will properly assure that, as is the case with other potentially serious events like extremely severe hurricanes and earthquakes (we already design for some of these, of course), aircraft impacts are examined early on as part of the design process.

A great deal of security-related activity at nuclear plants the past five years has centered on steps to mitigate the effects of events like aircraft impacts. This action will enhance the defense-in-depth philosophy that is used in designing these new facilities -- which due to advanced designs will have even higher margins of safety than the 103 nuclear plants operating in the United States today.
More later, if warranted.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

By
Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...
23 comments
Read more

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

By
Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...
7 comments
Read more

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

By
You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...
6 comments
Read more