Study of the resilience of nuclear power plants in response to climate change

In recent years, it has become even more challenging to ensure the safety of nuclear power plants due to accelerated climate change. This is because some existing safety systems in the plants are not able to cope with new issues introduced or aggravated by climate change. In response to this need, this paper will analyze the present related reactor safety systems and propose and discuss a measure that can potentially improve the resilience of the reactor system to climate change. To facilitate the research, the intake structure blockage caused by the outbreak of a kind of marine organism whose size varies from 4mm to 40mm, is chosen as a case study. The study will consider the ability of the system to anticipate for the events, absorb the impact of the events to the system, and recover from perturbations. To facilitate the research, a mathematical model will be developed using Petri nets to simulate the reliability and health states of the related safety systems, the occurrence of disruptive events, the corresponding responses of the nuclear system, and the possible operation states and recovery of the system from the disruptive events. The results indicated that the intake structure blockage caused by such external events cannot be ignored. The research is expected lay a solid foundation for future nuclear power system design and the resilience assessment of nuclear reactor systems.