Research

The war in Ukraine has shown that nuclear power plants, which are essential for a country's energy infrastructure, can be the target of military attacks. This is despite international agreements designed to prevent attacks on particularly dangerous industrial plants. Although nuclear power plants are designed to withstand external impacts (earthquakes, floods, plane crashes, etc.), acts of war at the reactor site and shelling of buildings on the power plant site, as well as the deliberate destruction of the grid connection, are neither part of the design nor part of the safety analysis of a nuclear power plant. However, Russia's attack on Ukraine has shown that precisely such effects on a nuclear power plant are possible in a military conflict. However, as the effects of war were neither taken into account in the design nor examined in safety and risk analyses, a high level of vulnerability and susceptibility to failure is probable or at least possible. This applies even if neither of the warring parties has the direct intention of destroying the reactor. This project will therefore investigate the consequences of a military impact on a Westinghouse AP-1000 reactor as an example. Reactors of this type of power plant are currently planned in Poland. At the same time, however, Poland is often mentioned in the Russian mass media as a hostile country and a possible further target. Slovenia is also considering the construction of a new NPP, whereby an AP-1000 from Westinghouse is also not ruled out. On the one hand, it will be investigated how hits from weapon systems typically used by Russian combat units affect the containment of the AP-1000. The passive safety concept of the AP-1000 relies on large volumes of water as a heat sink. In order to require only gravitational forces for cooling, these water tanks are located on the roof of the containment. The first step is therefore to investigate what damage could be expected in plausible or extreme scenarios. For this analysis, cooperation with the NBC Defense Center of the Austrian Armed Forces is planned. In addition, it is assumed that there is a complete power failure in the facility (station blackout) as a result of the fighting, as one of the warring parties has damaged the external power supply and the emergency power supply has also been severely damaged. This is highly likely to lead to an accident with core damage and the release of radionuclides into the environment. It is therefore necessary to simulate not only the reactor's thermal-hydraulic system, but also the reactor containment.

The policy advice project of the Federal Ministry for Climate Protection (BMK) provides for participation in the Nuclear Safety Standard Committee (NUSSC) of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The work includes the development, evaluation and review or revision of standards relating to the safety of nuclear facilities. As Austria's representative, this specifically involves preparation, basic coordination of positions on the individual agenda items with the “Nuclear Coordination”, active participation in meetings and subsequent written reporting. The project offers the opportunity to reflect the state of the art in science and research, and possibly even beyond, in the international safety standards for nuclear facilities through appropriate work in the aforementioned committee. The prerequisite for this is the nomination of an expert by the competent national authority and acceptance of the nomination by the head of the “Nuclear Safety and Security” department of the IAEA. The nomination of Nikolaus Müllner is proposed for this project.

The planned work is to contribute significantly to structuring the area of synthetic biology, which is still unclear with regard to its dual use potential (in particular in interaction with the associated converging technologies) with the aid of a future-oriented risk analysis and assessment. Based on this, a scientifically sound prognosis of the corresponding biosafety risks is to be drawn up. In addition, this work is intended to lay the foundation for a continuation of such an analysis by operationalizing the procedure for analysis and assessment in the sense of a tool.