Highlights of Countermeasures and Measures to Prevent or Mitigate Adverse Environmental Impacts
The AP1000 pressurized water reactor (PWR) nuclear power unit used in the Hubei Xianning Nuclear Power Plant is an advanced, non-energetic nuclear power plant, which, compared with traditional PWR nuclear power plants, includes many non-energetic safety features and a large number of simplifications of the plant's systems to enhance the plant's safety and simplify the plant's operation, and to reduces the need for plant maintenance. At the same time, the AP1000 has the same safety features as other pressurized water reactors (including CPR1000 units):
The design adopts the concept of defense-in-depth, which effectively ensures the safe and stable operation of the plant and controls the release of radioactive materials through five levels of rational operational design, operating procedures, monitoring systems, dedicated safety facilities, and radiological consequence mitigation facilities. The release of radioactive materials is controlled. In addition, four safety physical barriers are arranged: the fuel core block, the fuel cladding, the pressure boundary of the first circuit that separates the radioactive and non-radioactive circuits, and the solid and reliable containment, so that the radioactive substances generated by the fission of nuclear fuel need to break through the multiple barriers when entering into the environment, and the release of radioactivity is guaranteed to be minimized in terms of physical isolation.
According to the AP1000 design control document, the AP1000 radioactive waste gas adopts the activated carbon adsorption delayed decay treatment technology, and the plant waste gas discharge port is located on the side of the containment structure. Radioactive waste liquid treatment adopts the principle of combining fixed equipment and mobile equipment, and mainly adopts filtration and ion exchange treatment technology. Radioactive solid waste is classified and packaged in the plant and treated outside the plant.