Probabilistic safety assessment of nuclear power plants considering climate change

Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) of Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) must take into account the impact of Climate Change (CC). In this paper, to do this, a PSA framework is developed coupling a CC impact assessment model, a source term estimation model, an atmospheric dispersion model and a groundwater contaminant transport model. The impact of CC on aquifer contamination is analyzed in terms of i) increase of accident initiating event frequencies due to CC-induced natural events and ii) alteration of hydrological conditions due to the CC influence on physical variables (e.g., temperature and precipitation) that affect atmospheric dispersion and groundwater transport of radioactive contaminant. An application of the proposed framework is performed with regards to the estimation of the peak dose following a hypothetical severe accident in a NPP site in South Korea. Under the assumptions made, CC is found to worsen the consequences of such accident in terms of groundwater radioactive contamination.