Development of Fuel Product Barrier Monitoring System Based on State Functions in State-Oriented Emergency Operating Procedure

Abstract

For pressurized water reactor nuclear power plants, in order to prevent the release of radioactive substances into environment, fission product barriers (FPBs) are constructed based on the concept of defense-in-depth, including fuel clad, reactor coolant system (RCS), and containment; the status of these FPBs is then acting as an important dimension to decision-making of emergency action levels (EALs). For CPR1000 nuclear power plants, state functions defined in state-oriented emergency operating procedure (SOP) are used to characterize postaccident physical conditions; their degradation substantially represents the challenges on fundamental safety functions and then on the integrity of FPBs in like manner, so degradation of these state functions is referred to as determining initial conditions of each FPB, by which the link between SOP and EALs is established. Then, an intelligent FPB monitoring system (FPBMS) aiming to automatically monitor states of FPBs is developed, verified, and validated. The pioneering work, by building bridges between state functions and initial conditions of FPBs and then computerizing them innovatively, proves that dynamical monitoring of states of FPBs during accident evolvement and real-time indication of loss or potential loss of FPBs can be achieved, which is most helpful in decision-making of EALs.