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WIPP: Lessons in transportation safety
As part of a future consent-based approach by the federal government to site new deep geologic repositories for nuclear waste, local communities and states that are considering hosting such facilities are sure to have many questions. Currently, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is the only example of such a repository in operation, and it offers the opportunity for state and local officials to visit and judge for themselves the risks and benefits of hosting a similar facility. But its history can also provide lessons for these officials, particularly the political process leading up to the opening of WIPP, the safety of WIPP operations and transportation of waste from generator facilities to the site, and the economic impacts the project has had on the local area of Carlsbad, as well as the rest of the state of New Mexico.
V. B. Morozov, A. E. Kiselev, A. A. Kiselev, K. S. Dolganov, D. Yu. Tomashchik, S. N. Krasnoperov
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 2 | February 2021 | Pages 204-216
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1767998
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper considers the issues of safety assessment of new nuclear power plant (NPP) projects with VVER Generation III+ reactors in relation to the probability target for large release, which is subject to verification in the development of a full-scale Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) Level 2. The design solutions implemented in Generation III+ reactors allow reducing the probability of a severe accident (SA) due to internal initial events to a level of 10−7/year. Exceeding the radioactive release criterion may thus be related mainly to the consequences of beyond-design external events. This places special demands both for the selection of SA scenarios to consider and the methods for modeling the accident progression and consequences. The paper presents a method for selecting the representative SAs in the frame of PSA of new VVER NPP projects and a practical example of radiological analysis for two bounding accidents at an arbitrary NPP using an advanced integrated computer code system.