Conceptual studies of construction and safety enhancement of ocean SMART mounted on GBS

Abstract

From the Fukushima accident, protection of NPPs from any imaginable natural disasters became very important. In this study, the authors suggest a new concept of ocean nuclear power plant (ONPP) by using SMART as a reference reactor, which is the most recent Small Modular Reactor (SMR) developed by Korea, to demonstrate that the proposed concept can improve the safety of NPP from earthquake and tsunami. The proposed concept utilizes Gravity Based Structure (GBS), which is a widely spread construction technique of offshore plants. Because, floating type or submerged type NPPs can be easily affected by severe ocean environments such as tsunamis and storms, additional safety features have to be added to the existing land based plant. In contrast, the newly proposed GBS-type ONPP does not require going through significant design modifications due to inherent characteristics of the construction method. The authors have demonstrated this concept can be applied to the large nuclear power plant in the previous work and will expand this concept for SMRs in this paper. The authors discuss the new concept by presenting design parameters, design requirements, and the new total general arrangement. Furthermore, due to the unique configuration of ONPP SMART, innovative passive safety features can be added to the existing SMART design. The performance of proposed concept to resist earthquake as well as newly added passive safety feature will be discussed by presenting simplified analysis results.