A Balanced Approach for Establishing Fire Protection Requirements for CANDU Plants

Abstract

Fire issues in a nuclear power plant are generally complex, often involving safety and/or regulatory implications that cannot be readily quantified. Selection of the most appropriate fire protection measures may require knowledge based rationale and alternatives, as well as consideration of a number of intangible factors. Therefore significant assumptions and judgments are often required. When setting fire protection requirements, a balance needs to be struck between prescribing conservative requirements and allowing the designers to assess the individual hazards to determine specific requirements. Both approaches have their pros and cons and have room for improvements. This paper provides some discussion on how each approach can be improved to provide better fire protection design for a new CANDU plant like Advanced CANDU Reactor (ACR) and for the upgrade to existing plants.