Specific contents of the SAR for a nuclear desalination plant

Abstract

Although it is widely accepted that coupling a Desalination Plant (DP) to a Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) does not pose any significant additional hazard, it must clearly be considered as a major modification of the design and, therefore, requires issuing an ad hoc version of the Facility Safety Analysis Report (SAR). Documentation is already available covering general safety aspects of nuclear desalination, including standards and applicable requirements, as well as methodologies for assessing potential exposure. In this report, a specific analysis of the main features to be considered for producing the safety analysis report of a nuclear desalination plant will be presented. For the sake of clarity, it is assumed that there is an existing SAR of the NPP and only the additional information to be included in the SAR will be considered. The scope of this additional information is extremely dependent on the desalination technology and the coupling scheme. Therefore, the kind of nuclear desalination process coupling, i.e. thermal, mechanical or electrical, must be defined as a previous task. A thorough review of the main contents of the SAR is performed in order to identify the relevant points, if any, which need to be included in every chapter coping with the coupling. The SAR chapters' content and scope are considered in accordance with IAEA guidelines. As part of the safety report, possible accidental event analysis and their consequences must be included and, therefore, the deterministic analysis of an envelope case of contamination release through the DP must be assessed. The elaboration of this safety case is analysed, and the justified scope of the models needed to quantify the contamination transport mechanisms is presented. Finally, the most commonly accepted techniques and codes, used for the deterministic safety analysis of nuclear plants and effectively applicable to nuclear desalination plants, are presented by the use of the modelling tool DESNU.