EPR accident scenarios and provisions Original Research Article

For the EPR an improved defence-in-depth concept is applied. In an evolutionary way, accident control is developed from existing French and German PWR designs, thereby achieving a high safety level quantified by probabilistic safety assessment. Independent of that, severe accidents are considered in the design. By a robust containment and severe accident mitigation measures, the need for offsite emergency response actions (population evacuation or relocation) is restricted to the immediate plant vicinity. This paper gives an overview of the features introduced for, and the analyses correlated to, the dedicated primary depressurization, melt–coolant interaction, melt stabilization, hydrogen control, and containment heat removal.