Report on the European Safety and Environmental Assessment of Fusion Power (SEAFP)

Preliminary risk assessment of in-vessel leakage accident in ITER

The ITER project is one of the largest international cooperative scientific projects in the world, aiming to verify the feasibility of magnetic confinement controlled nuclear fusion technology and provide a technical basis for the subsequent construction of fusion energy power stations. The success or failure of ITER will greatly affect the commercialization process of fusion energy. The probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) was a powerful means to evaluate the risk and reliability of nuclear facility and achieved great success in safety assessment of fission power plants. Based on this, the PSA progress for ITER was proposed in this paper. And the in-vessel leakage accident was investigated to verify the effectiveness of proposed method. The result shows the maximum possible radiological consequences of ITER in-vessel leakage accident of ITER is 1.6E-3 mSv, and the frequencies of this consequence is 1.63E-8/year. The reason of this consequence was also discussed in this paper. Those result could provide some valuable reference for radiation risk assessment and safety supervision of fusion commercial reactor in the nuclear future.

Preliminary Study on Risk Identification and Assessment Framework for Fusion Radioactive Waste Management

Fusion reactors are expected to be safer, more environmentally friendly, and to have a lower nuclear proliferation risk, compared with other nuclear energy systems. However, it is widely recognized that a large amount of radioactive materials will be produced by a fusion reactor. Therefore, it is important to fully understand the overall radiation risk level of fusion radioactive wastes (radwaste) compared with existing nuclear energy systems. Studies on the treatment of the fusion radwaste have been currently focused on three ultimate options: clearance, recycling, and disposal by activation assessment of radioactive materials from the operation and decommissioning of fusion reactors. However, the radiation risk in the management of fusion radwaste, especially in the final disposal, was seldom studied. Based on the comparative analysis of fusion radioactive waste with ITER and fission reactors (e.g., pressurized water reactor, PWR), this paper tries to discuss how to determine the radiation risk in the process of fusion radwaste management on the premise of the current feasible industrial technology. On this basis, a risk assessment framework for repository disposal under normal degradation and external events is proposed.