• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.497-511
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• 2004

A PSV (pressurizer safety valve) popping test carried out in the early phases of a refueling outage may trigger a test-induced LOCA(loss of coolant accident) if a PSV fails to fully close and is stuck in a partially open position. According to a KSNP (Korea standard nuclear power plant) low power and shutdown PSA (probabilistic safety assessment), the failure of a high pressure safety injection (HPSI) accompanied by the failure of a PSV to fully close was identified as a dominant accident sequence with a significant impact on low power and shutdown risks (LPSR). In this study, we aim to investigate and verify a new means for mitigating this type of accident using a thermal-hydraulic analysis. In particular, we explore the applicability of an aggressive cool-down combined with operator actions. The results of the various sensitivity studies performed there will help reduce LPSR and improve Refueling outage safety.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.268-273
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• 2016

An innovative safety concept for a light water reactor has been developed at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute. It is a unique concept that adopts both a fast heat transfer mechanism for a small containment and a changing mechanism of the cooling geometry to take advantage of the potential, thermal, and dynamic energies of the cold water in the containment. It can bring about rapid cooling of the containment and long-term cooling of the decay heat. By virtue of this innovative concept, nuclear fuel damage events can be prevented. The ultimate heat transfer mechanism contributes to minimization of the heat exchanger size and containment volume. A small containment can ensure the underground construction, which can use river or seawater as an ultimate heat sink. The changing mechanism of the cooling geometry simplifies several safety systems and unifies diverse functions. Simplicity of the present safety system does not require any operator actions during events or accidents. Therefore, the unique safety concept of PX can realize both economic competitiveness and inherent safety.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.50 no.6
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• pp.981-988
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• 2018

An experiment was performed for the OECD/NEA ROSA-2 Project with the large-scale test facility (LSTF), which simulated a steam generator tube rupture (SGTR) accident due to a double-ended guillotine break of one of steam generator (SG) U-tubes with operator recovery actions in a pressurized water reactor. The relief valve of broken SG opened three times after the start of intact SG secondary-side depressurization as the recovery action. Multi-dimensional phenomena specific to the SGTR accident appeared such as significant thermal stratification in a cold leg in broken loop especially during the operation of high-pressure injection (HPI) system. The RELAP5/MOD3.3 code overpredicted the broken SG secondary-side pressure after the start of the intact SG secondary-side depressurization, and failed to calculate the cold leg fluid temperature in broken loop. The combination of the number of the ruptured SG tubes and the HPI system operation difference was found to significantly affect the primary and SG secondary-side pressures through sensitivity analyses with the RELAP5 code.

• Journal of Korea Society of Digital Industry and Information Management
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.11-19
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• 2012

Crane systems have been widely used for transportation in building sites, ports, nuclear wastehandling operation and so on. As a typical underactuated system, an overhead crane has such merits as high flexibility and less energy consumption. And it's getting more types of cranes, universally applicable algorithms should be developed. That is the design and development of scalable algorithms are required. Developed algorithms can be used for the controller and crane overload protection that meets the requirements of the algorithm are presented. These algorithms force the state to warn the operator and stops the operation of equipment. In this paper, crane overload conditions that can cause damage to alert the operator, and to limit the operation of equipment overload protection algorithm is presented.

• IE interfaces
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.751-758
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• 2000

Situation awareness is defined as a person's perception of the elements of the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their status in the near future. Situation awareness is important in attempting to evaluate human behavior in operating complex systems such as aircraft, air traffic control, and nuclear power plant systems. From the literatures this study reviews the relationship between situation awareness and numerous individual, system and environmental factors, and also reviews the methodologies for the empirical measurement of situation awareness applicable to Korea Next Generation Reactor (KNGR) design project. Attention, working memory, workload, stress, system complexity, and automation are presented as critical factors limiting operator's situation awareness. Mental models and goal-directed behavior are hypothesized as important mechanisms overcoming these limits. This study summarized hypothesized guidelines for interface design to improve situation awareness of reactor operators. Some of the guidelines should be tested in the KNGR evaluation experiments in the future.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers A
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• v.53 no.8
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• pp.484-489
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• 2004

When the energy resource available to a particular plant (be it coal, oil, gas, water, or nuclear fuel) is a limiting factor in the operation of the plant, the entire economic dispatch calculation must be done differently. Each economic dispatch calculation must account for what happened before and what will happen in the future. This paper presents a formulation and a solution method for the optimization problem with a fuel constraint in a competitive electricity market. Take-or- Pay (TOP) contract for an energy resource is the typical constraint as a limiting factor. Two approaches are proposed in this paper for modeling the dispatch calculation in a market mechanism. The approaches differ in the subject who considers and inserts the fuel-constraint into its optimization problem. Market operator and each power producer having a TOP contract are assumed as such subjects. The two approaches are compared from the viewpoint of profits. surplus. and social welfare on the basis of Nash Equilibrium.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.37 no.5
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• pp.491-502
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• 2005

Reliable human performance is a prerequisite in securing the safety of complicated process systems such as nuclear power plants. However, the amount of available knowledge that can explain why operators deviate from an expected performance level is so small because of the infrequency of real accidents. Therefore, in this study, a database that contains a set of useful information extracted from simulated emergencies was developed in order to provide important clues for understanding the change of operators' performance under stressful conditions (i.e., real accidents). The database was developed under Microsoft Windows TM environment using Microsoft Access $97^{TM}$ and Microsoft Visual Basic $6.0^{TM}$. In the database, operators' performance data obtained from the analysis of over 100 audio-visual records for simulated emergencies were stored using twenty kinds of distinctive data fields. A total of ten kinds of operators' performance data are available from the developed database. Although it is still difficult to predict operators' performance under stressful conditions based on the results of simulated emergencies, simulation studies remain the most feasible way to scrutinize performance. Accordingly, it is expected that the performance data of this study will provide a concrete foundation for understanding the change of operators' performance in emergency situations.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Pressure Vessels and Piping
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.70-74
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• 2014

An Operating Experience Report(OER) has written about events and accidents happened at a Nuclear Power Plant(NPP). The purpose of publishing the OER is to prevent the similar event or accident repeatedly by spreading the experience of a single plant to other plants personnel. In this paper, it is analyses that the foreign NPPs' OERs on JIT published by the International Nuclear Agency(WANO, INPO, COG, BE). The analysis introduced in this paper is performed along with the various factors such as type of work, root-cause, and equipment. The root-cause analysis about the OERs shows that the Human-error is the major factor in foreign NPPs, but on the other hand equipment problem is the main part of the Domestic NPPs. The ratio of the foreign NPP's OERs on JIT according to the type of work was applied to KHNP-JIT developed nowadays for the first time in KOREA.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.179-190
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• 2003

The multiple steam generator tube rupture (SGTR) event scenario with available safety systems was experimentally and analytically evaluated. The experiment was conducted on the large scaled test facility to simulate the multiple SGTR event and investigate the effectiveness of operator actions. As a result, it indicated that the opening of pressurizer power operated relief valve was significantly effective in quickly terminating the primary-to-secondary break flow even for the 6.5 tubes rupture. In the analysis, the recent version of RELAP5 code was assessed with the test data. It indicated that the calculations agreed well with the measured data and that the plant responses such as the water level and relief valve cycling in the damaged steam generator were reasonably predicted. Finally, sensitivity study on the number of ruptured tubes up to 10 tubes was performed to investigate the coolant release into atmosphere. It indicated that the integrated steam mass released was not significantly varied with the number of ruptured tubes although the damaged steam generator was overfilled for more than 3 tubes rupture. These findings are expected to provide useful information in understanding and evaluating the plant ability to mitigate the consequence of multiple SGTR event.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.8
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• pp.2915-2923
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• 2022

There is an increasing interest in passive safety systems to minimize the need for operator intervention or external power sources in nuclear power plants. Because a passive system has a weak driving force, there is greater uncertainty in the performance compared with an active system. In previous studies, several methods have been suggested to evaluate passive system reliability, and many of them estimated the failure probability using thermal-hydraulic analyses and the Monte Carlo method. However, if the functional failure of a passive system is rare, it is difficult to estimate the failure probability using conventional methods owing to their high computational time. In this paper, a procedure for the application of the Chernoff bound to the evaluation of passive system reliability is proposed. A feasibility study of the procedure was conducted on a passive decay heat removal system of a micro modular reactor in its conceptual design phase, and it was demonstrated that the passive system reliability can be evaluated without performing a large number of thermal-hydraulic analyses or Monte Carlo simulations when the system has a small failure probability. Accordingly, the advantages and constraints of applying the Chernoff bound for passive system reliability evaluation are discussed in this paper.