封锁期间提升老化核电厂的安全性

Keeping a plant producing electricity safely and reliably for decades starts with careful design, high quality materials and sound construction. In addition to that, safety depends on sound management, policies, procedures, processes and practices; the capability and reliability of operating personnel; adequate resources; and frequent upgrading and modifications to plant structures, systems and components.  All these contribute to the prolonging of a plant’s life.

SALTO’s safety review service supports these processes by comparing a facility’s long-term operation related activities and programmes against IAEA Safety Standards and proven good international practices and then providing recommendations to operators to improve preparedness for safe LTO and achieve consistency with IAEA Safety Standards.

“We appreciate the IAEA support to our plant in ageing management and preparation for safe LTO,” said Dan Bigu, a corporate director at the Cernavoda Nuclear Power Plant, who was site Director during a SALTO mission in February 2020. “The results of this mission will help us to improve our activities for safe LTO and to further align them with IAEA safety standards.”

Summaries of all SALTO missions are made available on the IAEA’s website along with analyses of all mission results in 2005-2015 and 2015-2018.

The third edition of the SALTO Peer Review Guidelines, published in June 2021, expands on previous iterations — offering new detailed guidance for reviewers, introducing facilities for self-assessment and the development of self-identified issues prior to the SALTO missions, and providing better information to facilities for preparations for the missions.

With travel restrictions to ease gradually in the near future, safety review missions, such as SALTO, will resume with advanced preparation already taking place. A next milestone will be the 50th mission, which might happen later in 2021 or early 2022.

Before that, missions to several nuclear power plants are planned. At the request of Ukraine’s government, the SALTO team is preparing to conduct a review mission in August 2021, for instance. Ukraine’s 15 operational reactor units produced 53.9% of the country’s total electricity in 2019 and the country’s energy strategy through 2035 notes commitment to keep the share of nuclear energy at half of total electricity production. The country’s state-owned nuclear energy enterprise, Energoatom, estimates its nuclear fleet has avoided 2.7 billion tonnes of CO₂­ emissions over the course of its operational lifetime — a greenhouse gas equivalent of over 587 million passenger vehicles being driven for one year.