Increased Accident Tolerance of Fuels for Light Water Reactors - Workshop Proceedings, OECD/NEA Headquarters, Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, 10-12 December 2012

The Fukushima accident in March 2011 raised concerns about the safety of current and future nuclear power plants both inside and outside the international nuclear energy community. With a view to learning lessons from this accident a large consensus emerged on the need to strengthen each level of Defence-In-Depth, reinforcing both prevention and mitigation. The fuel performance characteristics identified as being central to increased accident tolerance for long-term loss of coolant include reduced clad-steam reactions, reduced hydrogen production and improved fission product retention. New fuel designs which offered the potential to incorporate these characteristics, while retaining the operational performance of existing designs, would therefore be considered as suitable candidates for further investigation. Under the auspices of the NEA Nuclear Science Committee, a workshop has been organised to bring together international experts from the modelling, safety, operations and regulatory technical disciplines to discuss the various issues related to increased accident tolerance of fuels for Light Water Reactors and to help establish a co-ordinated international approach in this field. The organisation of this workshop was also supported by the NEA Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations. These proceedings include all the abstract papers presented at this workshop. The programme was comprised of 4 sessions: - Session 1: Lessons learned from the Fukushima accident; - Session 2: Accident-tolerant fuel design; - Session 3: Reactor operation, safety, fuel cycle constraints, economics and licensing; - Session 4: Synthesis and future programmes. A total of 55 participants from 16 countries attended the workshop, with 26 technical presentations and 2 breakout parallel sessions (one on safety issues, the other on reactor performance, R and D and technological issues). The attendees represented a broad spectrum of stakeholders involved in different nuclear energy organisations, mainly R and D and industry and representatives from regulatory bodies. The list of participants is given in Annex 2