Preliminary risk assessment of in-vessel leakage accident in ITER

Sci Rep. 2024 Feb 12;14(1):3486. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-53304-9.

Abstract

The ITER project is one of the largest international cooperative scientific projects in the world, aiming to verify the feasibility of magnetic confinement controlled nuclear fusion technology and provide a technical basis for the subsequent construction of fusion energy power stations. The success or failure of ITER will greatly affect the commercialization process of fusion energy. The probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) was a powerful means to evaluate the risk and reliability of nuclear facility and achieved great success in safety assessment of fission power plants. Based on this, the PSA progress for ITER was proposed in this paper. And the in-vessel leakage accident was investigated to verify the effectiveness of proposed method. The result shows the maximum possible radiological consequences of ITER in-vessel leakage accident of ITER is 1.6E-3 mSv, and the frequencies of this consequence is 1.63E-8/year. The reason of this consequence was also discussed in this paper. Those result could provide some valuable reference for radiation risk assessment and safety supervision of fusion commercial reactor in the nuclear future.