The IAEA, within the implementation of its Action Plan on Nuclear Safety, has developed an online training toolkit designed to support capacity building in Member States that are embarking on a Severe Accident Management Guideline (SAMG) programme or are reviewing an existing one.
The toolkit for Severe Accident Management Guideline Development (SAMG-D) is intended to help nuclear power plant operators develop and select a set of guidelines appropriate for their specific plant. It incorporates both reference material as well as the tools to develop such accident management guidance and can be used both online and in real training workshops.
Nuclear power plants are designed to withstand a large number of incidents and accidents, so that possible radiological consequences of such events will be low and within predefined limits. For this purpose, nuclear power plants have been equipped with safety systems, and have a set of emergency operating procedures (EOPs) that help operators to achieve a final stable and safe end state.
Severe accident management guidelines were developed to provide operators with systematic guidance on the mitigating actions to be taken during severe accidents. The main objective of these SAMGs is to utilize any available equipment at the nuclear power plant to terminate core damage, maintain containment integrity, and minimize off-site radionuclide releases.
The IAEA SAMG-Toolkit, developed by the Nuclear Power Technology Development Section, consists of four modules:
- Module 1: Introduction to Nuclear Safety and Accident Management describes the basic elements of nuclear safety and accident management. It also explains the differences between emergency operating procedures and severe accident management guidelines.
- Module 2: Severe Accident Phenomena and Strategies to Mitigate Fission Product Boundary Challenges, describes the complex physiochemical and radiological phenomena associated with severe accidents and identifies processes that challenge fission product boundaries and potential releases if these fail.
- Module 3: Development of Severe Accident Management Guidelines describes the way the strategies are developed into plant specific guidelines to manage an accident scenario most effectively.
- Module 4: Implementation of Severe Accident Management Guidelines describes the organizational measures needed to develop and implement the plant specific guidelines in the overall plant emergency organization.
For a detailed description of the modules and to download the SAMG-D toolkit, please click here.