Felleseminar – IFT – Aud B

Fredag 30. Mars kl 14.15

“A Preliminary Survey on Recent Activities in Research Reactor Centres Following Fukushima-Daiichi NPPs Accident”

Danas Ridikas

IAEA, Vienna, Austria; on long term leave from CEA Saclay, France

Following the core melting and the radiological consequences as a result of TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi (FD) reactor accident, there has been a worldwide initiative to perform complementary safety assessments of nuclear installations. Correspondingly, the community of research reactor (RR) stakeholders, operators and regulators expressed publically their readiness to re-evaluate and update the safety status of the facilities, facing a possibility of similar external events. Although the RRs are generating on average one thousand times lower energy than NPPs, and accordingly their radioactive source term is reduced, there are important common safety related topics to be checked and revised (i.e. the seismic design, blackout initiated events, external events resulting in the loss of ultimate heat sink, accident management programmes, emergency organization/crisis preparedness, etc..).

As the first immediate step to assist the Member States regarding this unprecedented event, the IAEA distributed a questionnaire in order to collect from the RR managers, operating the facilities with power higher than 1MW, the preliminary information on the activities initiated following the TEPCO’s FD reactor accident in March 2011. The questionnaire contained two general questions and three specific questions with multiple-answer capability. For the specific questions, it was acceptable to mark more than one answer for each question.

By the end of 2011, 63 answers were received, from 33 countries (out of 56 countries operating RRs). Following the general question “What was done in your organization following the F-D event?”, the answers to this question indicated that 70% launched a dedicated activity, more than 30% revised the Design Base Accidents list in the Safety Analysis Report (SAR) and the Emergency Preparedness Programme (EPP) and about 10% went all the way and updated both SAR and EPP.

This talk will provide an overview of present status of RRs world-wide [1], issues and challenges these facilities are facing nowadays, including preliminary analysis of the above questionnaire [2].

About the lecturer:

Danas Ridikas since July 2008 holds a position of the Research Reactor Officer at the Department of Nuclear Sciences and Applications of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). His main responsibility is the management and implementation of the project “Enhancement of utilization and applications of research reactors”.

Before coming to the IAEA, Danas Ridikas has worked for more than 10 years at the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) as a senior scientist and, later, as a group leader in Nuclear Physics Division.