Development of alternate methods of determining integrated SMR source terms

Abstract

The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) Small Modular Reactor (SMR) Licensing Task Force (TF) has been evaluating licensing issues unique and important to iPWRs, ranking these issues, and developing NEI position papers for submittal to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) during the past three years. Papers have been developed and submitted to the NRC in a range of areas including: Price-Anderson Act, NRC annual fees, security, modularity, and staffing. In December, 2012, NEI completed a draft position paper on SMR source terms and participated in an NRC public meeting presenting a summary of this paper, which was subsequently submitted to the NRC. One important conclusion of the source term paper was the evaluation and selection of high importance areas where additional research would have a significant impact on source terms. The highest ranked research area was iPWR containment aerosol natural deposition. The NRC accepts the use of existing aerosol deposition correlations in Regulatory Guide 1.183, but these were developed for large light water reactor (LWR) containments. Application of these correlations to an iPWR design has resulted in greater than a ten-fold reduction of containment airborne aerosol inventory as compared to large LWRs. Development and experimental justification of containment aerosol naturalmore » deposition correlations specifically for the unique iPWR containments is expected to result in a large reduction of design basis and beyond-design-basis accident source terms with concomitantly smaller dose to workers and the public. Therefore, NRC acceptance of iPWR containment aerosol natural deposition correlations will directly support the industry’s goal of reducing the Emergency Planning Zone (EPZ) for SMRs. Based on the results in this work, it is clear that thermophoresis is relatively unimportant for iPWRs. Gravitational settling is well understood, and may be the dominant process for a dry environment. Diffusiophoresis and enhanced settling by particle growth are the dominant processes for determining DFs for expected conditions in an iPWR containment. These processes are dependent on the areato-volume (A/V) ratio, which should benefit iPWR designs because these reactors have higher A/Vs compared to existing LWRs.« less