OECD-NEA PIRT for SFP in LOCA, Pariz (Francija), 03-05.04.2017
Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), which operates within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has currently 29 member countries and was established on 1 February 1958. The main mission of the agency is to assist its members in the conservation and development of the environment, which will offer the scientific, technological and legal basis for the safe, environmentally friendly and economically justified use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes through international cooperation. Another important role of the agency is to create a credible assessments and responses to key questions about nuclear energy and to provide support to individual member governments in the decisions that are related to nuclear energy policy.
On the Fukushima events, the Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations (CSNI), which operates within the NEA, responded with a variety of activities in support of the adoption of the new decisions. The result of one of these activities was the preparation of the report "Status Report on Spent Fuel Pools Under Loss-of-Cooling and Loss-of-Coolant Accident Conditions," which summarizes current knowledge about such accidents. The report recommends implementing a methodology Phenomena Identification and Ranking Table (PIRT) in order to systematically identify the events, which are of great importance to nuclear safety and on which the available knowledge is inadequate. It is a methodology that in the first phase identifies key events related to a particular topic, so SFP, and in the second phase, based on the vote of the group of experts of the workgroup members, identifies the importance of individual phenomena and evaluates the reliability of the voting results, thus enabling the creation of priorities for further consideration. JSI has joined the workgroup only in the second phase of the report preparation.
The first day of the meeting, the discussion was about the second PIRT report draft, which already represents a solid approximation of the final report. On the second day, we focused on the selection and evaluation of identified phenomena, which for the case of an incident with a loss of cooling and / or loss of coolant require priority attention. On the third day, we focused on open issues, conclusions and recommendations and we prepared a time plan for further work.
The fourth final workgroup meeting, which was organized by the IRSN on 3-5.4.2017 at the OECD conference center in Paris, was attended by Reactor Engineering division associate dr. Marko Matkovič. At the meeting there were 23 registered and nominated representatives of various organizations.