Introduction to fire safety in nuclear power plants

Abstract

Fire is a major risk for the safety of NPP's. The Browns Ferry fire and other incidents have made evident that a fire might occur within all parts of a NPP. These fires may develop differently from a fire in a conventional building as usually no smoke removal systems are at hand and the fire detection and fire fighting become much more difficult than in common industrial buildings, respectively. The special “nuclear” boundary conditions e.g. the absolut confinement of radioactivity impose severe restrictions on the fire protection and fire fighting measures. Since quite a number of years serious efforts have been made to further reduce the risk of fires in NPP's e.g. by avoiding or at least minimizing any fire load, by a consequent separation of redundant systems, by additional fire insulations for components and cables, by installing automatic fire suppression systems whereever useful and possible and by improved computational predictions of the eventual fire impacts on the whole system. At the Post-SMiRT Seminar No. 6 the international and national status of work in the field of fire protection in NPP's was presented. In the present introductory part a brief discussion on risk assessment, fire incidents, fire experiments, fire modelling and future developments is being raised. In the following reports these topics are elaborated in a more extended way. Therefore one may get an international point of view about the single questons raised by studying the appropriate expert reports in the proceedings. The Seminar No. 6 is intended as to establish an international forum for experts in the field of nuclear fire safety science. It should also help the experts of fire protection to get to know the experts in nuclear engineering of different countries and further it shall contribute to an open exchange of special knowledge and experiences in safety related problems of NPP's which is an old custom already established in other fields of nuclear safety since many years.