Final Report of the Programme on the Safety of Wwer and Rbmk Nuclear Power Plants

FOREWORD This report presents an overview of the activities of the Extrabudgetary Programme (EBP) on the Safety of WWER and RBMK Nuclear Power Plants during the period 1990-1998. The Programme background, its objectives and its scope are described in Sections 1 and 2. The report focuses on the wide scope of the activities aimed at identifying safety deficiencies, ranking their safety importance on the results of the safety missions, review of safety improvement programmes and on areas where future work is necessary. The information in the report reflects, to a large extent, the situation as it stood when the individual International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) tasks actually took place. Since then, however, work has been continuing in the framework of national, bilateral and international programmes. In order to bridge this gap, information recently brought to the attention of the IAEA has been included in the report. This report deals with IAEA related activities. Therefore, references to other national, bilateral and multilateral programmes to improve WWER and RBMK safety are made only in specific cases where the results of such programmes have been used in the framework of the IAEA activities. In this context, it should be mentioned that an effective mechanism of coordination between the IAEA and other programmes helped to minimize any undue duplication of work. Individual sections describing results related to WWER and RBMK power plants are structured in a format which reflects the EBP tasks. The report discusses selected safety issues and safety review results as they apply to each reactor type; generic issues which are common to more than one reactor type are addressed separately. This report addresses only those issues which had been selected for review by nuclear safety experts and which were subsequently discussed in dedicated IAEA technical meetings. Indeed, a primary target of the Programme was to facilitate the exchange of technical information among specialists, to consolidate the results obtained and to provide guidance on the work remaining to be done at the installations concerned. These results are discussed in Sections 3 to 8. Section 9 provides an overview of the work which remains to be done and for which relevant IAEA assistance is planned. Section 10 presents Conclusions to this report. Finally, it should be noted that the results, recommendations and conclusions resulting from the IAEA's Programme are intended only to assist national decision makers who have the sole responsibilities for the …