Virtual decommissioning simulator for optimazation of the nuclear facility decommissioning

The decommissioning market is expected to grow rapidly in a few decades owing to the change of nuclear policy in several major countries and the increase of decrepit nuclear power plants. Decommissioning of nuclear facilities demand a large scale of budget and high level of safety, and therefore the preliminary verification of dismantling scenarios is very important. In recent years, the manufacturing industry has aggressively adopted the virtual manufacturing technology to verify the facilities and processes with high efficiency. P.G. Maropoulos and D. Ceglarek reviewed the standard definitions of verification and validation in the context of engineering design and progresses, and presented industrial requirements and research trends related to the technology. The virtual manufacturing technology was beginning to be adopted in the area of the nuclear facility decommissioning. The virtual decommissioning simulator in this paper is developed to verify various dismantling scenarios over nuclear facilities with low cost and high efficiency. Existing virtual manufacturing technologies are inadequate for verification of dismantling scenarios since the object segmenting function absolutely required for graphical simulations over dismantling scenarios is unavailable