New Approach for Environmental Protection During Severe Accidents at Nuclear Power Plants

This paper reports new approaches for increasing environmental protection during severe accidents at NPPs. For NPPs with two protective shells and pressure release system such as WWER-1000 we suggest a new comprehensive, passive-mode environmental protection system of decontamination of the radioactive air-steam mixture from the containment and the intercontainment area, which includes the “wet” stage (scrubbers, etc.), the “dry” stage (sorption module), and also an ejector, which in a passive mode is capable of solving the multi-purpose task of decontamination of the air-steam mixture. For Russian WWER-440/V-230 NPPs we suggest three protection levels: 1) a jet-vortex condenser; 2) the spray system; 3) a sorption module. For modern designs of new generation NPPs, which do not provide for pressure release systems, we proposed a new passive filtering system together with the passive heat-removal system, which can be used during severe accidents in case all power supply units become unavailable.