The EUR Assessment Process and Highlights of the Compliance Analysis for the EU-APR Standard Design

Abstract

The EU-APR standard design is a two-loop pressurised water reactor of the range of 1400MWe, developed by Korean Hydro & Nuclear Power (KHNP) from the Korean APR1400 reference plant. It is the objective of the EU-APR to comply with the current main European regulatory and utility requirements for safe and competitive LWR NPPs. A full assessment of the EU-APR against the European Utility Requirements (EUR) can therefore be regarded as an important step in its introduction to the European market. KHNP’s request to assess its EU-APR standard design was granted by the EUR Organisation and in autumn of 2015, a two-year assessment process started, during which the EU-APR was assessed against the twenty chapters of the EUR Document Volume 2, encompassing over four thousand individual requirements having in view principally NPP safety and performance. The EU-APR standard design was assessed against each single requirement by experts of the appropriate discipline from within the EUR member companies. The resultant assessment reports were reviewed by the Coordination Group (working level team) and then validated by the EUR Administration Group and EUR Steering Committee. The syntheses of the requirement-by-requirement assessments per chapter were collected in the principal project output: the EU-APR dedicated subset of EUR Document Volume 3. This Volume 3 subset (Subset I) also contains a technical description of the plant, issued by KHNP and reviewed by the EUR organisation. Furthermore, it explains the assessment process and highlights the main assessment results. Volume 3 Subset I was approved by the EUR Steering Committee in September 2017. The EU-APR standard design was found to be fully compliant for a majority (almost 90%) of all requirements applicable in this assessment. Furthermore, the EU-APR was found to be compliant with the objectives of an additional 6% of the investigated requirements. The EU-APR standard design can be considered to be in the late basic design phase. Nonetheless, the portion of requirements which were not assessable is very low (below 3%), explained by the abundant availability of reference plant (detailed design) documentation, which often helped demonstrate by means of extrapolatable examples KHNP’s adherence to design principles established for the EU-APR. In total, less than 1% of assessed requirements were found to be non-compliant. The main non-compliances relate to choices of design principles and analysis methods that are explicitly different from those stipulated by EUR, and to the relatively low level of development of reactor core and fuel studies to demonstrate operational nuclear plant manoeuvrability and fuel cycle optimisation in view of safety margins and economics.