"Simultaneous Consideration of Earthquake and Tsunami in Nuclear Power Plant Safety Assessment"
Dr. Min-gyu Kim (left) and Dr. Jung-gon Ha (right) from the Instrumentation Structure Prediction and Diagnosis Research Division at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute operating the "Nuclear Power Plant Safety Assessment Program Considering Complex Natural Disasters." (Photo by Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute)
[Asia Economy Reporter Moon Chaeseok] The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute has developed the world's first program to evaluate nuclear power plant safety considering complex natural disasters like the 2011 Fukushima incident in Japan (earthquake + tsunami).
On the 2nd, the Institute announced that Dr. Kim Mingyu's research team from the Department of Equipment Structure Prediction and Diagnosis developed the related program for the first time worldwide.
Last year, Dr. Kim's team published research on complex natural disaster evaluation algorithms in the international energy journal 'Energies' and completed patent applications.
They completed the development of the 'Complex Natural Disaster Safety Evaluation Program' earlier this year and officially registered the program last month.
Dr. Kim's team established a methodology to evaluate the impact of complex natural disasters on nuclear power plant safety and developed algorithms to efficiently perform related calculations.
Using this, they also succeeded in developing a safety evaluation program that includes a user interface (UI). Thanks to this, practical safety evaluations have become possible.
The team created complex disaster maps and complex vulnerability assessments considering the effects of both earthquakes and tsunamis on nuclear power plants. Using the developed algorithms, they derived the final risk values.
In this process, the program was designed to consider correlations between different devices on the same floor within the nuclear plant or between similar devices on different floors. This significantly increased the reliability of the calculated values.
With the development of a program capable of deriving risk values, researchers have opened an easier path to approach the field of complex natural disasters than before.
The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute expects this achievement to secure diversity in the field of complex natural disaster research and serve as an opportunity to showcase domestic technological capabilities in nuclear power plant safety evaluation to the global market.
Dr. Kim stated, "The program developed this time will contribute to enhancing the safety of operating and new nuclear power plants," adding, "We plan to continue research to further develop the program so it can be applied to natural disasters beyond earthquakes and tsunamis and to lead various international collaborations."
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