Development of Highly Survivable Power and Communication System for NPP Instruments under Severe Accident

According to the detail report from the Fukushima nuclear accident, the failure of conventional instruments is mainly due to the following reasons. 1) Insufficient backup battery capacity after the station black out (SBO) 2) The malfunction or damage of instruments due to the extremely harsh ambient condition after the severe accident 3) The cut-off of power and communication cable due to the physical shocks of hydrogen explosion after the severe accident Since the current equipment qualification (EQ) for the NPP instruments is based on the design basis accident such as loss of coolant accident (LOCA), conventional instruments, which are examined under EQ condition, cannot guarantee their normal operation during the severe accident. A 7m-long-distance wireless power transfer and a radio frequency (RF) communication were introduced with conventional wired system to increase a redundancy. A heat isolation box and a harness are adopted to provide a protection from the expected physical shocks such as missiles and drastic increase of ambient temperature and pressure. A detail design principle of the highly survivable power and communication system, which has 4 sub-systems of a DCRS wireless power transfer, a Zigbee wireless communication, a GFRP harness, and a passive type router with a fly back regulator, has been presented in this paper. Each sub-system has been designed to have a robust operation characteristic regardless of the estimated physical shocks after the severe accident