Peter Mast, an NPRE alumnus with over 30 years experience in national labs and industry, will explore new safety initiatives resulting from the nuclear disaster that devastated Japan a year ago.
Mast, BS 73, MS 74, PhD 79, will present NPRE’s seminar at 4 p.m., Tuesday, February, 21, in 165 Everitt Laboratory on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus.
Mast’s thesis work, completed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), involved developing a computer code to predict timing and location of fuel pin failures during severe overpower accidents in Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactors (LMFBRs). He continued his work at Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratory, investigating aspects of core accident response via code analysis and experiments performed in the Sandia test reactor. Mast was one of the first to analyze and predict the extent of core damage in the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident.
Since the mid-1980s, Mast has worked in the consulting industry, concentrating on nuclear power generation, waste disposal, and material production. In 1994 he co-founded and became President of Innovative Technology Solutions Corp., which merged with Alion Science and Technology Corp. in 2003.
Mast has actively analyzed debris generation during severe loss of coolant accidents and the impact this has on ECCS pump performance. This interest led to his teaming with ENERCON Services to implement plant modifications that would mitigate such effects.
Japan’s crises occurred at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plants following a severe earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011. The disaster made clear several weaknesses in the plants’ design relative to their ability to withstand effects of beyond design-basis events. Both the previously estimated likelihood of such events occurring and the plants’ coping ability were called into question.
In order to increase confidence in the ability of nuclear plants in the United States to withstand extreme low probability events, the industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission undertook a series of actions designed to enhance plant safety.
Mast’s seminar will provide a brief history of the industry/regulatory response to the accident, and focus on ongoing and upcoming industry initiatives designed to lessen the likelihood of such an incident in this country. Specifically, topics include:
- Revised external event hazard assessments (seismic and flooding) based on improved data and models, as well as changes to the plants and the surrounding locale since they were licensed
- Proposed plant modifications to better accommodate external event threats
- Plant modifications to extend the ability to cope with the impact of an extended station blackout event (loss of offsite power)
- Initiatives to improve plant and spent fuel pool instrumentation to improve real-time accident management capability
- Emergency Response Planning improvements.