The majority of Small Modular Reactor (SMR) designs for near-term deployment adopt advanced passive safety system technology to cope with both design basis- and design extension conditions. The goal of the CRP is to develop a common novel approach for designing passive engineered safety features for SMRs and offer methods or good practices for assessing their performance and reliability. Design safety considerations on appropriate and practical countermeasures to incorporate and address lessons learned from the major accidents to enhance the design of engineered safety systems of SMRs (particularly of the integral-PWR type currently under development) will be developed.
The overall objective of this CRP is develop approaches for designing passive engineered safety features for SMRs and propose methods for the assessment of their performance and reliability.The CRP will highlight comparison of reliability and performance assessment methods for key safety issues on water-cooled SMRs, including: (1) separation and independence of reactor trip and safety system actuation logics; (2) diversity and redundancy for depressurizing the reactor coolant pressure boundary to facilitate safety injection during a high pressure transient; (3) diversity and redundancy of core cooling; (4) options and approaches for assuring containment structural integrity; and (5) the use of natural circulation for primary core heat removal. The CRP will also investigate how passive safety system technology can be used and retrofitted into the operating PWRs or BWRs and those under construction.
Explore and formulate future R&D needs on advanced system thermal-hydraulic and reactor safety engineering to complement SMR design for near term deployment;
Perform validation of methodologies for SMRs’ passive safety features performance assessment using experimental test facilities;
Develop a common novel approach for designing passive engineered safety features for SMRs and provide methods for assessing their performance and reliability;