2024年3月8日(金) 08:50 〜 10:30 315 (Conference Center 3F)

Chair:Mark Kirk(Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry)
Co-Chair:Naoki Miura(Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry)

Organizer: Mark Kirk (CRIEPI)
Co-organizer: Naoki Miura (CRIEPI)
Aim and Scope for Special Session:
Worldwide nations are reassessing their policies with an eye towards improving the stability and robustness of their energy systems following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and subsequent shock to the prices and stability of global petrochemical markets. Many nations now seem destined to adopt a more accepting stance to generation of electricity using nuclear power moving forward. In Japan substantive discussions of licensing plants for 60 years are now underway, this after a decade long hiatus initiated by the incident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. In the USA plants are being licensed for 80 and possibly 100 years while SMRs are getting closer to realization. The Belgian government has reversed its decision to close all plants by 2025, while in the Netherlands and in South Korea new builds of classic Generation III plants are being again considered or are underway.
A key to realizing benefits from long-term operation (LTO) of existing NPPs is to increase the confidence of both regulatory agencies and the public in their safety while simultaneously reducing plant operating costs. These goals are enabled by adopting more efficient procedures for monitoring and demonstrating safety, procedures built on foundational knowledge accumulated over the last half-century of plant operation and industry research. Unfortunately, despite this vast increase in knowledge, proposed procedures to demonstrate safety and license plants for extended operation differ little from procedures adopted in the 1970s. Due to the limited state of knowledge at that time these old procedures contain conservatisms. While large conservatisms were needed in the past to ensure safety, this is no longer the case.