EPR Severe Accident Threats and Mitigation

Despite the extremely low EPR core melt frequency, an improved defence-in-depth approach is applied in order to comply with the EPR safety target: no stringent countermeasures should be necessary outside the immediate plant vicinity like evacuation, relocation or food control other than the first harvest in case of a severe accident. Design provisions eliminate energetic events and maintain the containment integrity and leak-tightness during the entire course of the accident. Based on scenarios that cover a broad range of physical phenomena and which provide a sound envelope of boundary conditions associated with each containment challenge, a selection of representative loads has been done, for which mitigation measures have to cope with. This paper presents the main critical threats and the approach used to mitigate those threats. (authors)