Post-
Fukushima
Engineering
By Steve Brinkman and Jim Harrell,
Zachry Nuclear Engineering, Inc.
Steve Brinkman
Steve Brinkman serves as Engineering
Director for Zachry Nuclear
Engineering, Inc.
(ZNE), where he
is responsible
for operational
and engineering
execution
across the ZNE
enterprise. His
resume includes
over 36 years
of operations,
maintenance,
engineering,
outage/work
planning & project
management
experience,
including 17 years
with an electric
utility where he held an NRC operating
license. He holds a Bachelor’s in
Mechanical Engineering and Master’s
Degree in Computer Science.
.
Responses to questions by Newal
Agnihotri, Editor of Nuclear Plant
Journal.
1.
Describe Zachry’s top two projects
which have helped the utilities meet
USNRC’s beyond-design-basis (BDB)
requirements.
Steve Brinkman:
The Great East Ja-
pan Earthquake of March 11, 2011 created
a tsunami that devastated the Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear site. This impacted the
worldwide nuclear community and re-
sulted in efforts to address what had long
been identified as contributors to nuclear
power plant risk in plant-specific PRAs:
The extended loss of alternating current
(ac) power (ELAP) and loss of normal ac-
cess to the ultimate heat sink (LUHS). The
occurrence of these beyond-design-basis
(BDB) events places the nuclear facility in
a condition outside of what it has been ana-
lyzed to cope with to ensure reactor safety.
Subsequently, the addition of diverse and
flexible mitigation strategies—or FLEX—
to increase the de-
fense-in-depth for
b e y o n d - d e s i g n -
basis scenarios to
address an ELAP
and LUHS occur-
ring simultaneously
at all units on a site
has been undertaken
for the entire US op-
erating nuclear fleet.
While there are
many components
to the overall FLEX
strategy,
Zachry
was significantly
involved in two
primary areas to
help utilities meet
the NRC’s BDB requirements: the use
of portable equipment to obtain power
and water and the staging and protection
of the portable equipment. Zachry
was responsible for the design of, and
supported the installation of, numerous
modifications to plant systems to allow
the quick deployment and hookup of
portable pumps to facilitate inventory
replenishment of water storage tanks and
to allow makeup water into necessary
system flow paths to maintain or restore
key safety functions for all reactors at a
site. The scope of these activities involved
piping modifications to numerous safety
systems (AFW, ECCS) to incorporate
new connection hook ups which included
the development of adapters that could
be installed on valve bonnets and blind
flanges to facilitate the connections.
Modifications were also required for
the electrical systems necessitating
the installation of cables, breakers
and transfer switches to support the
connection of portable diesel generators
to supply electrical power to vital busses
and instrumentation, battery chargers
and air recirculating cooling units.
Similar modifications were designed and
implemented to support the use of new
communication equipment to allow for
both onsite and offsite communication.
These projects were essential for assuring
the ability to maintain or restore core,
containment and spent fuel pool (SFP)
cooling capabilities until they can be
accomplished with resources brought
from off-site.
All of this temporary portable
equipment needed to be staged and
adequately protected from applicable site-
specific severe external events to provide
reasonable assurance that it would remain
deployable following such an event.
This warranted the development of BDB
storage buildings that are designed to
withstand the effects of a BDB event
and provide protection to the equipment
stored within. Zachry was responsible
for the development of modification
packages and for the installation support
for these new storage buildings.
2.
Describe the application of GOTHIC,
PROTO--Suites, and RADTRAD-NAI
in the beyond-design-basis analysis of
nuclear power plants.
Jim Harrell:
GOTHIC
TM
* is based
on fundamental physical models and
has been extensively benchmarked
over its 30+ years of development.
Both these attributes made GOTHIC
capable of responding to the beyond-
design-basis analysis needs following
Fukushima. Since that time, GOTHIC
has been utilized extensively to support
multi-dimensional analyses of extended
loss of power (ELAP) and investigate
*GOTHIC incorporates technology
developed for the electric power industry
under the sponsorship of EPRI, the
Electric Power Research Institute.
40
NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, January-February 2016
