New safety strategies for nuclear power plants: A review

摘要

The Extensive Damage Mitigation Guideline (EDMG), which was developed by the U.S. Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) owing to the motivation of 911 terrorist attacks and not allowed to spread before the Fukushima nuclear accident, was publicly available after Fukushima nuclear accident and paid attention to worldwide. Many countries have adopted the U.S. EDMG methodology and developed their strategies (some are not called EDMG but have similar functions), planning to introduce it into the emergency plans of their domestic nuclear power plants (NPPs). Based on the defense-in-depth (DID) concept of nuclear safety, the experience of the Fukushima nuclear accident, and the state-of-the-art of EDMGs research, this paper will give a comprehensive review of EDMG. To illustrate the reason for the introduction of EDMG into the traditional NPP procedures/guidelines, the review work started from the perspective of DID in nuclear safety and the reason for the Fukushima nuclear accident from the viewpoint of DID, which showed the weaknesses of DID implementation strategy - underestimation of the damage during a beyond-design-basis external event (BDBEE). EDMG is crucial complementary for the old framework of procedures/guidelines to enhance the concept of DID. The research progress of EDMG in different countries has been reviewed and a rough comparison has been made among them according to the present state-of-the-art from literature. The methodology of EDMG is summarized as follows: (a) Loss of Large Area (LOLA) - the originally designed scenario for EDMG; (b) elements of EDMG - the summarized contents for EDMG implementation;(c) classification of EDMG - initial response EDMGs and Technical Support Center (TSC) response EDMGs; (d) implementation of EDMGintroduction of three phases of EDMG implementation step by step. Furthermore, three typical methods to integrate EDMG into the traditional procedures/guidelines are reviewed. Finally, this paper gives some concluding remarks for EDMG-related critical issues and recommended future work, which may be challenges for the development and application of EDMG and useful for the related researchers.