Updated Nuclear Industry Technical Basis Report

The Electrical Power Research Institute (EPRI) provides thought leadership, industry expertise and collaborative value to help the power industry identify issues, safety gaps and any other needs that come to light. Its recommendations are widely followed internationally by the nuclear power industry. After the accident at Fukushima, EPRI needed to update their technical basis report with lessons learned from the disaster. This report serves as the foundation for the development of severe accident management guidelines.

We updated the 1992 technical basis report to reflect new information from the disaster. It addressed the build-up of hydrogen in a secondary building, addition of salt water to the reactor system and included strategies to address spent fuel and inventory loss as well as pool cooling. The updated technical basis report served as direct input into the owner’s group efforts to revise and improve their severe accident management strategies. In turn, each utility was then able to take the generic owner’s group guidelines and create plant-specific guidelines.