IAEA 6th INPRO Forum on Licensing and Safety Issues for SMRs - 29 July - August 2, 2013

The subject of the 6th INPRO (International Project on Innovative Reactors and Fuel Cycles) Dialogue Forum organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna from July 29th to August 2nd 2013 was Licensing and Safety Issues for Small and Medium-Sized Reactors, (SMRs) one of this blog's favorite topics. (The 3rd INPRO Dialogue Forum, held 14-18 November 2011, was also on SMRs, with the title "Common User Considerations for Small and Medium-sized Nuclear Power Reactors").

Dr. David Newland of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission was the Program Chair, with Poong-Eil Juhn of the Republic of Korea as Co-Chair. After an Opening and Introductory session, the second Session was on Experiences and Preparation for SMR Deployment, in which 8 Member States (MSs) of the IAEA - in alphabetical order: Canada, China, France, India, Japan, Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation and the USA presented the status of their national licensing and safety programs for SMR licensing. There were two presentations from the USA - one each from the Department of Energy (USDOE) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC).

This was followed by a Panel Discussion on Licensing and Safety Issues for SMRs (with Dr. David Newland of Canada, R. Seban of France, M. Ricotti of Italy, S-H Rhee of Korea, and I. Bylov of the Russian Federation as panelists). The conferees then broke out into 5 groups whose topics the organizers had circulated beforehand: (1) Designs; (2) Siting ; (3) Graded Approach in regulatory and licensing process; (4) Legal (5) Public Participation, each of which was briefed by their Group Leader in Session 3, prior to breakout. Session 4 was devoted to presentations from International Organizations: ASME, OECD-NEA, WENRA, and WNA.

In Session 5, the Group Leaders of the Breakout Sessions reported back (1. Soderholm, 2. deVos, 3. Ramakrishna  and 4. Magruder), and Session 6 concluded with reports from:  Mr. M.H. Subki of the IAEA on the questionnaire distributed to participants, Dr. Daniel Ingersoll on a summary of the plenary sessions; a Meeting Summary by the Program Chair Dr. David Newland; and a final word each from Z. Drace of INPRO and J.K. Park of the NENP/IAEA.

The final report on the 6th INPRO Dialogue Forum on Licensing and Safety Issues for SMRs is available here.

(The IAEA also held a Technical Meeting on SMR Technology Development for Near-Term Deployment in Chengdu, China - September 2-4, 2013, and a Technical Meeting on Instrumentation & Control in Advanced SMRs, 21-24 May 2013.)

 

IAEA Course on Natural Circulation Phenomena - Harbin, China

The IAEA is conducting a course on Natural Circulation Phenomena and Passive Safety Systems in Advanced Water-Cooled Reactors at the College of Nuclear Science and Technology of the Harbin Engineering University at Harbin in Northern China, July 11-15, 2011.

Several recent advanced reactor designs (both large reactors like the ESBWR and the AP-1000, and integral pressurized water reactor [iPWR] designs in the SMR category, like mPower, NuScale and the newly announced Westinghouse SMR) propose natural circulation systems for decay heat removal. Other evolutionary designs also propose natural circulation convective systems for heat transfer in regular operation. The site of the first AP-1000 units to be constructed anywhere, the Sanmen Nuclear Power Plant (where two AP-1000 units are currently under construction) with planned in-service dates in 2013-14, is in China. China is also planning 1400 MWe and 1700 MWe variant designs based on the AP-1000, with the CAP-1400 said to be in an advanced design stage. Presumably, these will also utilize passive safety systems based on natural circulation, and this strong interest in natural circulation cooling in China is one of the main reasons that the location of this IAEA course is in Harbin.

The agenda for the course comprises both introductory and advanced lectures, by distinguished researchers in the field of natural circulation cooling, including Drs. Jose Reyes, Dilip Saha, Nusret Aksan, and F. D'Auria, among others. Particularly of interest is the lecture by Dr. Reyes on Thursday 14 July on Flow Stagnation in Single and Two-Phase Natural Circulation Loops [literature citation], which will discuss mechanisms which can interrupt natural circulation - for example, in a PWR, loss of heat sink could result in reverse heat transfer in the steam generator, interrupting single phase natural circulation. This and other mechanisms that interrupt both single- and two-phase natural circulation were studied by Dr. Reyes' group at Oregon State University in special thermalhydraulic loops constructed for the purpose. Scaling relationships are critical in understanding the applicability of results obtained from such loops to real reactor systems, and Dr. Reyes also presents a lecture on Integral System Experiment Scaling Methodology, while Dr. Dilip Saha presents a related lecture on Experimental Validation and Database of Simple Loop Facilities. Developing reliability models of passive safety systems utilizing natural circulation is critical to safety analysis of such reactors, and Prof. F. D'Auria will present a lecture on Reliability of Thermalhydraulic Passive Safety Systems. Generally speaking, studies of natural circulation phenomena are complicated by the fact that the driving force is usually quite weak, as compared, for example, to turbulence or friction that may also be present in the flow.

Canada: Nuclear Renaissance or Nuclear Vita Nova?

The Nuclear Renaissance has been a much-awaited thing in Canada, for at least the last four years, if not longer. Renaissance, of course, suggests the idea of 'rebirth', a beginning anew of a life once lived; with the subtext that things in this rebirthed life will be much the same as before, only newer.

Over the last several decades, the Canadian nuclear industry evolved to encompass three main sectors: Uranium Mining, Reactors for Power Production, and Radioisotopes for Medical Uses. Of these three, the reactor segment has had the greatest visibility, while, on a worldwide basis, it was actually the uranium mining and medical radioisotope segments which had the greatest relative market share. A 'renaissance' in the Canadian nuclear sector therefore came to be understood primarily in terms of new reactors, and new reactors essentially of the same CANDU pressure-tube configuration that Canada pioneered and which now are operating in many other countries as well.

But in his speech at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Annual Regulatory Information Conference in March 2009, NRC-RIC-2009, the Deputy Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mr. Tomohiro Taniguchi of Japan, speaking at the session on Global Perspectives on the Nuclear Renaissance, introduced a new phrase that he hoped would refocus the emphasis on new ways of doing things in the new nuclear age: Nuclear Vita Nova:

I, on the other hand, view this reality as a Vita Nova, or new life, because the nuclear community needs new ideas and innovative thinking to address new challenges, rather than a simple revival of the "good old days."

At the current juncture, when Nuclear New Build - which seemed imminent just a few months ago - has been indefinitely postponed in the main Canadian province; when the main Canadian reactor builder faces an uncertain future; and when the main private reactor operator in Canada has withdrawn its license applications for new nuclear reactors - it is certainly worth pondering what is in store for the Canadian nuclear sector - a Renaissance, or a Vita Nova? And if it is to be the latter, might the relative (and perceived) importance of the three main sectors change from what it was in the past? At the moment the answer is not clear, but the singular salience of the question must certainly be recognized.

(Dr. Taniguchi took care to mention at the end of his talk, for the benefit of those who might have missed the allusion, which, given his audience, was probably everybody - that his neologism 'Vita Nova' was actually the Latin form of the Italian La Vita Nuova, the title of a collection of verse that Dante Alighieri wrote in 1295, being an expression of the medieval genre of courtly love. Incidentally, the incoming Director General of the IAEA, beginning 01 December 2009, is also from Japan - Yukiya Amano. He will be taking over from Dr. Mohamed El-Baradei of Egypt, who has been named Director General Emeritus, an honor he shares with Dr. Hans Blix. Dr. Amano's appointment to the Director-Generalship of the IAEA will be ratified during the 53rd General Conference of the IAEA in Vienna, 14-18 September 2009. Like Dr. El-Baradei and Dr. Blix, Dr. Amano is also a lawyer. By coincidence, the current Director-General of ITER, Mr. Kaname Ikeda, and the current Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Mr. Nobuo Tanaka, are also Japanese.)


Update: After I wrote this post, I discovered that on the TV Ontario program The Agenda, the season-opening episode on 8th September had been on Canada's Nuclear Future. I am pleased to embed the video, featuring an extremely spirited discussion (in which, as Steve Paikin, the host, quipped, they ran out of time but clearly not energy. The astute physicist reader of this blog will immediately see Steve Paikin's probably unintended pun here - since energy and time are classically canonically conjugate variables, they are related through a quantum uncertainty principle - the more precisely you bound one of them [in this case, time], the more uncertain the other will be!):