SAMA Analysis in Support of License Renewal Application for the Fort Calhoun Station

The Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) owns and operates the Fort Calhoun Station Unit 1 (FCS), a single unit Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) plant. This plant was licensed by the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to operate at a core power level of 1500 MWt for a period of 40 years. In 2002 OPPD submitted a license renewal application to the NRC and recently, this application for a license renewal for a period of 20 more years was approved by the NRC. In order to secure the license renewal, the utility evaluated Severe Accident Mitigation Alternatives (SAMAs) and identified potential risk significant and cost-beneficial plant changes. This process consisted of a review of past industry changes obtained via past SAMA analyses and advanced reactor design efforts as well as a review of FCS PSA insights. While most of the industry-based SAMAs were screened out, the internally focused changes were mostly found to be risk significant and cost effective. This paper presents the SAMA analysis performed in support of the FCS license renewal application and discusses the insights from this analysis.