• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.291-298
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• 2003

The KN-12 transport cask has been designed to transport 12 PWR spent nuclear fuel assemblies and to comply with the regulatory requirements for a Type B(U) package. The containment boundary of the cask is defined by a cask body, a cask lid, lid bolts with nuts, O-ring seals and a bolted closure lid. The containment vessel for the cask consists of a forged thick-walled carbon steel cylindrical body with an integrally-welded carbon steel bottom and is closed by a lid made of stainless steel, which is fastened to the cask body by lid bolts with nuts and sealed by double elastomer O-rings. In the cask lid an opening is closed by a plug with an O-ring seal and covered by the bolted closure lid sealed with an O-ring. The cask must maintain a radioactivity release rate of not more than the regulatory limit for normal transport conditions and for hypothetical accident conditions, as required by the related regulations. The containment requirements of the cask are satisfied by maintaining a maximum air reference leak rate of $2.7{\times}10^{-4}ref.cm^3s^{-1}$ or a helium leak rate of $3.3{\times}10^{-4}cm^3s^{-1}$ for normal transport conditions and for hypothetical accident conditions.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.468-482
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• 2001

As a process of Direct Containment Heating (DCH) issue resolution for Korean Standard Nuclear Power Plants (KSNPs), a containment load/strength assessment with two different approaches, the probabilistic and the deterministic, was performed with all plant-specific and phenomena-specific data. In case of the probabilistic approach, the framework developed to support the Zion DCH study, Two-Cell Equilibrium (TCE) coupled with Latin Hypercubic Sampling (LHS), provided a very efficient tool to resolve DCH issue. In case of the deterministic approach, the evaluation methodology using the sophisticated mechanistic computer code, CONTAIN 2.0 was developed, based on findings from DCH-related experiments or analyses. For three bounding scenarios designated as Scenarios V, Va, and VI, the calculation results of TCE/LHS and CONTAIN 2.0 with the conservatism or typical estimation for uncertain parameters, showed that the containment failure resulted from DCH loads was not likely to occur. To verify that these two approaches might be conservative , the containment loads resulting from typical high-pressure accident scenarios (SBO and SBLOCA) for KSNPs were also predicted. The CONTAIN 2.0 calculations with boundary and initial conditions from the MAAP4 predictions, including the sensitivity calculations for DCH phenomenological parameters, have confirmed that the predicted containment pressure and temperature were much below those from these two approaches, and, therefore, DCH issue for KSNPS might be not a problem.

• Journal of the Korean Geosynthetics Society
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.1-7
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• 2008

The geotextile tube shall be sewen with geotextile longitudinally in the shape of hose and it shall be filled hydraulically through filling ports at the proper intervals to construct structure. Geotextile container shall be sewen after spreading of geotextile on the split barge and sealed shut after the filling soil, and then moved and positioned at the required position. And the geotextile container passes through the bottom of barge by opening split barge and drops to the seabed to form structure. This structure for the ${\bigcirc}{\bigcirc}$ project, UAE and we would propose that geotextile containment for core material of power plant breakwater to be constructed for lower bunds with containers up to -4.0m and do upper parts with the structures of tube up to 0.0m. For the application of proposed geotextile containment, review on stability of breakwaters and design consideration were adopted. The evaluation on stability of geotextile containment was classified by 3 items, internal design consideration for material selection, reviews on stability for individual and global structure. In this research, the geothermal analysis was performed to estimate the geothermal behavior of central breakwater. Central breakwater is located boundary of intake and outfall channel, it is mean that the central breakwater is thermal boundary of intake low temperature sea water and outfall high temperature sea water. Therefore, it is required to be designed a low permeability to ensure no mix of intake and outfall waters.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.236-245
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• 2016

In a reactor coolant system of a nuclear power plant (NPP), an overpressure protection system keeps pressure in the loop within 110% of design pressure. However if the system does not work properly, pressure in the loop could elevate hugely in a short time. It would be seriously disastrous if a weak point in the pressure boundary component bursts and releases radioactive material within the containment; and it may lead to a leak outside the containment. In this study, a gross deformation that leads to a burst of pressure boundary components was investigated. Major components in the primary pressure boundary that is structurally important were selected based on structural mechanics, then, they were used to study the burst pressure of components by finite element method (FEM) analysis and by number of closed forms of theoretical relations. The burst pressure was also used as a metric of design optimization. It revealed which component was the weakest and which component had the highest margin to bursting failure. This information is valuable in severe accident progression prediction. The burst pressures of APR-1400, AP1000 and VVER-1000 reactor coolant systems were evaluated and compared to give relative margins of safety.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.245-255
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• 2013

According to natural frequency of soil, characteristics of earthquake responses of an isolated containment building in nuclear power plants are examined. For this, earthquake response analysis of seismically isolated containment buildings in nuclear power plants is carried out by strictly considering soil-structure interactions. The structure and near-field soil are modeled by the finite element method while far-field soil by consistent transmitting boundary. The equation of motion of a soil-structure interaction system under incident seismic wave is derived. The derived equations of motion are solved to carry out earthquake analysis of a seismically isolated soil-structure system. Generally, the results of this analysis show that seismic isolation significantly reduces the responses of the soil-structure system. However, if the natural frequency of the soil is similar to that of the soil-structure system, the responses of the containment buildings in nuclear power plants rather increases due to interactions in the system.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.11-25
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• 2015

The accident at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March 2011, caused by an earthquake and a subsequent tsunami, resulted in a failure of the power systems that are needed to cool the reactors at the plant. The accident progression in the absence of heat removal systems caused Units 1-3 to undergo fuel melting. Containment pressurization and hydrogen explosions ultimately resulted in the escape of radioactivity from reactor containments into the atmosphere and ocean. Problems in containment venting operation, leakage from primary containment boundary to the reactor building, improper functioning of standby gas treatment system (SGTS), unmitigated hydrogen accumulation in the reactor building were identified as some of the reasons those added-up in the severity of the accident. The Fukushima accident not only initiated worldwide demand for installation of adequate control and mitigation measures to minimize the potential source term to the environment but also advocated assessment of the existing mitigation systems performance behavior under a wide range of postulated accident scenarios. The uncertainty in estimating the released fraction of the radionuclides due to the Fukushima accident also underlined the need for comprehensive understanding of fission product behavior as a function of the thermal hydraulic conditions and the type of gaseous, aqueous, and solid materials available for interaction, e.g., gas components, decontamination paint, aerosols, and water pools. In the light of the Fukushima accident, additional experimental needs identified for hydrogen and fission product issues need to be investigated in an integrated and optimized way. Additionally, as more and more passive safety systems, such as passive autocatalytic recombiners and filtered containment venting systems are being retrofitted in current reactors and also planned for future reactors, identified hydrogen and fission product issues will need to be coupled with the operation of passive safety systems in phenomena oriented and coupled effects experiments. In the present paper, potential hydrogen and fission product issues raised by the Fukushima accident are discussed. The discussion focuses on hydrogen and fission product behavior inside nuclear power plant containments under severe accident conditions. The relevant experimental investigations conducted in the technical scale containment THAI (thermal hydraulics, hydrogen, aerosols, and iodine) test facility (9.2 m high, 3.2 m in diameter, and $60m^3$ volume) are discussed in the light of the Fukushima accident.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.167-174
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• 2021

Recent investigation into the integrity of nuclear containment buildings has highlighted the importance of developing an elaborate diagnostic method to evaluate the distribution and size of cavities inside concrete walls. As part of developing such a method, this paper presents a finite element approach to modeling elastic waves propagating in the containment building walls of a nuclear power plant. We introduce a perfectly matched layer (PML) wave-absorbing boundary to limit the large-scale nuclear containment wall to the region of interest. The formulation results in a semi-discrete form with symmetric damping and stiffness matrices. The transient elastic wave equations for a mixed unsplit-field PML were solved for displacement and stresses in the time domain. Numerical results show that the sensitivity of displacement, velocity, acceleration, and stresses is large depending on the size and location of the cavity. The dynamic response of the wall slightly differs depending on the existence of the containment liner plate. The results of this study can be applied to a full-waveform inversion approach for characterizing cavities inside a containment wall.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.47 no.5
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• pp.567-578
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• 2015

In a nuclear reactor containment, wall condensation forms with noncondensable gases and their accumulation near the condensate film leads to a significant reduction in heat transfer. In the framework of nuclear reactor safety, the film condensation in the presence of noncondensable gases is of high relevance with regards to safety concerns as it is closely associated with peak pressure predictions for containment integrity and the performance of components installed for containment cooling in accident conditions. In the present study, CUPID code, which has been developed by KAERI for the analysis of transient two-phase flows in nuclear reactor components, is improved for simulating film condensation in the presence of noncondensable gases. In order to evaluate the condensate heat transfer accurately in a large system using the two-fluid model, a mass diffusion model, a liquid film model, and a wall film condensation model were implemented into CUPID. For the condensation simulation, a wall function approach with a heat/mass transfer analogy was applied in order to save computational time without considerable refinement for the boundary layer. This paper presents the implemented wall film condensation model, and then introduces the simulation result using the improved CUPID for a conceptual condensation problem in a large system.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2006.04a
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• pp.639-646
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• 2006

A nonlinear finite element analysis is carried out to predict the ultimate internal pressure and failure mechanism of a 1/4 scale prestressed concrete containment vessel(PCCV) model using the commercial code ABAQUS. Therefore, this paper is mainly focused to compare the influence of concrete material model, tension stiffening parameter, uplift phenomenon and basemat. From the analysis results, nonlinear behavior of the PCCV showed a substantially different aspects in accordance with the nonlinear material model for the concrete as well as tension stiffening parameter. The boundary conditions beneath the basemat are considered to be a fixed condition and a nonlinear spring element to compare the influence of the uplift. The finite element analysis is considered with and without a basemat to find out the influence of the basemant itself. From the analysis results, the nonlinear behavior of the PCCV is entirely similar for the two cases.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.56 no.7
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• pp.2524-2533
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• 2024

When analyzing containment thermal-hydraulics, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a powerful tool because multi-dimensional and local analysis is required for some accident scenarios. According to the previous study, neglecting steam bulk condensation in the CFD analysis leads to a significant error in boundary layer profiles. Validating the condensation model requires the experimental data near the condensing surface, however, available boundary layer data is quite limited. It is also important to confirm whether the heat and mass transfer analogy (HMTA) is still valid in the presence of bulk condensation. In this study, the boundary layer measurements on the vertical condensing surface in the presence of air were performed with the rectangular channel facility WINCS, which was designed to measure the velocity, temperature, and concentration boundary layers. We set the laminar flow condition and varied the Richardson number (1.0-23) and the steam volume fraction (0.35-0.57). The experimental results were used to validate CFD analysis and HMTA models. For the former, we implemented a bulk condensation model assuming local thermal equilibrium into the CFD code and confirmed its validity. For the latter, we validated the HMTA-based correlations, confirming that the mixed convection correlation reasonably predicted the sum of wall and bulk condensation rates.