Michele Kearney's Nuclear Wire: Results of the SOARCA Study

Monday, February 20, 2012

Results of the SOARCA Study

NRC web page with links to reports: http://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/research/soar.html

The long-awaited results of the SOARCA Study, a landmark evaluation of realistic estimates of consequences of severe accidents at two US power plants have been released today yesterday by the USNRC.

As of January 21, 2012, the final reports for the USNRC SOARCA study have been publically released. SOARCA, standing for "State of Art Reactor Consequence Analysis" is a landmark analysis of potential consequences of severe accidents at two nuclear power plants which were pilot plants for the study: Surry and Peach Bottom. The study has been carried out over these many past years jointly by USNRC and their principal technical contractor Sandia National Laboratories. The study was motivated in part to update older consequence estimation studies, such as the 1982 Sandia Siting Study, by using modern state of art modeling methods embodied in the MELCOR and MACCS codes that have been developed and improved over the past nearly 30 years since the TMI accident spurred on more than $500M in severe accident research in the USA and Internationally. The studies provide best estimate treatments of accident progression, operator actions, core damage, radiological releases and emergency responses where historical large conservatisms are replaced with best estimate treatment. An uncertainty quantification study is currently underway.

The documents released include:
· NUREG-1935, Draft State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequence Analyses (SOARCA) report (ML120250406)
· NUREG/CR-7110, SOARCA Project, Volume 1: Peach Bottom Integrated Analysis (ML120260675)
· NUREG/CR-7110, SOARCA Project, Volume 2: Surry Integrated Analysis (ML120260681)
and a brochure titled:
· NUREG/BR-0359, Modeling Potential Reactor Accident Consequences (ML12026A470)

See also http://melcor.sandia.gov and http://www.nrc.gov