Improved safety approach for general safety designs of the next generation sodium-cooled fast reactor systems

Okano, Yasushi; Yamano, Hidemasa   ; Fujita, Satoshi; Kubo, Shigenobu ; Sakai, Takaaki; Nakai, Ryodai 

General safety approaches are developed for next generation SFR based on the fundamental safety characteristics with incorporating lessons learned from the TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi accidents. The fundamental characteristics are: reactivity, coolant pressure, sub-cool margin, ultimate heat sink, and sodium properties. These points are considered to derive general safety approach related to fundamental function. The key is to apply passive safety for prevention/mitigation of severe accident in design extension condition (DEC) with balancing active safety systems - passive mechanism should be built-in design for reactor shutdown and decay heat removal especially for DEC in order to enhance diversity to the engineered safety systems utilized for design basis accident. For containment integrity, the potentials of pressure/temperature increases via sodium leak and of significant mechanical energy release by re-criticality in the course of the CDA should be eliminated.