Accident management under extreme events

Abstract

Most nuclear power plants have extensive sets of Emergency Operating Procedures and Severe Accident Management Guidelines. These offer protection for a large series of events, both inside and outside the licensed design basis of the plant. For Extreme Events, which are characterised by a large destruction on-site and may include loss of command and control, damage to multiple units on-site, loss of communication both on-site and to off-site centres, staff members wounded or killed, such protection may not be enough. Examples of extreme events are air plane crash, site flooding, large earthquake plus possible tsunamis, etc. This paper describes what additional procedures, guidelines, hardware and organisational issues are needed to protect a site against such events. It is based on lessons learned from large destructive events in the past, such as the 9/11 attacks in the USA in 2001 and the tsunami at the Fukushima-Daiichi plants in 2011.