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North American construction is back—smaller and faster—at OPG’s Darlington
“The nuclear renaissance is real here,” said Ontario Power Generation’s Subo Sinnathamby on May 8, one year to the day after OPG secured a final investment decision to build the first of four planned BWRX-300 reactors at its Darlington nuclear power plant, and shortly after the new reactor’s foundation was lifted into place. “We got our license to construct in April and our [final investment decision] in May, and we’ve been off to the races since.”
Yu-Huai Shih, Shih-Jen Wang, Kai-Cheng Chuang, Tzu-En Huang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 186 | Number 3 | June 2014 | Pages 340-352
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT12-145
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Fukushima Daiichi accident occurred on March 11, 2011. A seismic event and tsunami induced an extended station blackout plus loss of the ultimate heat sink. Three units progressed into a core melt severe accident. The accident occurred in the emergency operation procedure (EOP) domain. However, this situation was already beyond the scope of an EOP. The operator followed the EOP faithfully, and a core melt situation still occurred. An interesting topic is whether it is possible to avoid this type of accident. The purpose of this study is to survey the Fukushima accident progression with respect to the effect of the containment venting strategy for the Chinshan Nuclear Power Plant EOPs. Under the emergency situation, only a small reactor pressure vessel (RPV) injection system was available. This type of accident may be avoided by an early shift from the EOP to the severe accident guideline (SAG), switching from high-pressure injection to low-pressure injection while the reactor core isolation cooling system is available, gradually lowering the RPV pressure, and maximizing the injection flow rate. The plant responses and accident physical phenomena were simulated using MAAP5. The results show that the consequences of an uncovered core and core melt can be avoided by adopting the proper RPV depressurization and containment venting strategy.