A Demonstration of Practical Elimination of Early or Large Fission Product Release for the UK ABWR Generic Design Assessment

The demand for continuous improvement in safety of nuclear power plants has led to an international expectation that early or large releases of fission products as a result of severe accidents be practically eliminated for new reactor designs. The UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has recently published the Seventh UK Report which provided confirmation of UK demonstrating compliance with the obligations of the Convention on Nuclear Safety [Ref-1]. Relating to Article 14 on the Assessment and Verification of Safety, the UK nuclear Regulator (Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR)) has the expectation of the demonstration of ‘practical elimination’ of potential severe accident states be included in the safety cases for new nuclear power plants [Ref-2]. In order to achieve this, the safety case should show either that it is physically impossible for the accident states to occur or the states can be considered to be extremely unlikely with a high degree of confidence by design provisions [Ref-3] [Ref-4] [Ref-5]. A demonstration framework was developed and applied successfully in the UK ABWR Generic Design Assessment (GDA) Pre-Construction Safety Report (PCSR) which was submitted to the ONR in August 2017 [Ref-6]. A summary of this demonstration is provided in this paper.