Year
2015
Abstract
Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute launched the pre-conceptual design for a pyroprocessing plant, which covers a process operation, plant layout and hot cell structure as well as safeguards system. Incorporating the safeguards by design concept early in the conceptual design phase of the nuclear facility is important for establishing an effective and efficient safeguards implementation. That also may reveal synergy components to potentially reduce safety and/or security risks, as well as improve major plant design characteristics including operational efficiency and minimize the life cycle cost. A system design is the process of defining architecture, components, interfaces and data for a system to satisfy specified requirements. Therefore it should start with defining a system requirements specification. This paper addresses the main requirements specification for a safeguards system for the pyroprocessing plant. Some of requirements are common in the general nuclear systems, especially a bulk handling facility. But many of them should be modified and specified for the pyroprocessing plant, considering its technical characteristics. Many requirements are related the plant capacity, process operation scheme as well as plant layout design. A basic concept for a practical-scale plant in this study is 30 metric ton of PWR spent fuel per year to recover the metallic form of uranium and actinide elements together which is usable for a metal fuel for a fast reactor. The study includes descriptions of the main features of key components in the process flow and plant design which impact on safeguards function, operation, and maintenance. Based on analyzing the process and facility design requirements, safeguards system’s functional requirements, maintainability, system interface requirements as well as constraints are described in detail. Input material accounting measurement is one of the key components in the safeguards system. The study also reviews several options based on the safeguards system requirements specification. It is expected that developed requirement specifications would help accelerate the interactions between plant designers and safeguards system developers and achieve the optimized performance of plant system via implementing safeguards by design concept.