Part 1 of 2 Parts
A major concern in the use of nuclear power is the possibility that an accident at a nuclear power plant could cause the reactor(s) to meltdown and release huge amounts of radiation into the environment. There have been three big nuclear accidents in the past forty years. These include Three Mile Island in the U.S. in 1979, Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 and Fukushima in Japan in 2011. The negative impact of these three accidents have resulted in many countries around the world to either phase out their nuclear power reactors or to pledge never to build any nuclear power reactors.
With the exception of a few countries such as Russia and China, the global market for nuclear power reactors is contracting. In the U.S., the past few years have seen the permanent closure of four nuclear power plant with plans to close more on the way. In the same time period, only two nuclear power reactors were being built. Global climate change requires us to quickly move away from fossil fuel use and nuclear power has been touted as reducing carbon emissions significantly.
Recently a research team consisting of Francesco D'Auria at the University of Pisa in Italy, Nenad Debrecin at the University of Zagreb in Croatia and Horst Glaeser at the Global Research for Safety in Germany published a report on their forty years of collaboration in the open-access peer-reviewed journal Nuclear Energy and Engineering published by the American Nuclear Society.
In their report, the team proposed a new type of safety barrier that could be used in big light water reactors which are in common use around the globe. The new barrier would cost a fraction of the obsolete barriers already in use and would reduce the probability of a core meltdown to the probability that a nuclear reactor would be hit by a big meteorite.
The design of the new barrier was based on the team’s research over the last few decades including research on accident analysis capabilities as well as nuclear fuel material performance. Concepts developed by the founders of the nuclear power industry were also used in the design. Their proposal is supported by studies and discussions from two major nuclear conferences; the 11th Scientific and Technical Conference "Safety Assurance of NPP with VVER" held in Russia in May of 2019 and the International Conference on Nuclear Power Plants, Structures, Risk & Decommissioning, NUPP2019 held in the United Kingdom in June of 2019).
One major motivation for the team’s proposal was to restore public confidence in nuclear power which has been severely impacted by the three nuclear accidents mentioned above. They also want to bring new knowledge about nuclear energy production gained over the last few decades into practice in the global nuclear power industry.
The team hopes to implement novel solutions inspired by up-to-date research into recently identified nuclear fuel structural weakness. They are also working on a more elaborate Extended Safety Margin Detection (E-SMD) system which will allow for the emergency shutdown of a nuclear reactor even in the face of low and very low probability events. It will also provide advance information to operators of nuclear power plants regarding the actions needed to prevent or reduce possible damage.
Please read Part 2