Development of a Surrogate System of a Plant Dynamics Simulation Model and an Abnormal Situation Identification System for Nuclear Power Plants Using Deep Neural Networks

Abstract

In the case of a new nuclear reactor, existing evaluation experience is limited; thus, accidents and troubles may occur as a result of such lack of experience. To deal with such situations, it is desirable to use a virtual nuclear plant to reproduce behaviors under various conditions and identify unknown anomalies from the behaviors. Then, when an abnormal situation occurs, one can quickly determine the cause of the abnormality to operate plant equipment and return the plant to a stable condition as quickly as possible. Two types of deep neural network (DNN) systems have been constructed to support the identification of unknown anomalies and the determination of their causes. One is a surrogate system that can estimate physical quantities of a nuclear power plant in a computational time of several orders less than a physical simulation model. The other is an abnormal situation identification system that can estimate the state of the disturbance causing an anomaly from physical quantities of a nuclear power plant. Both systems are trained and tested using data obtained from the analytical code for incore and plant dynamics (ACCORD), which reproduces the steady and dynamic behavior of the actual High Temperature Engineering Test Reactor (HTTR) under various scenarios. The DNN models are built by adjusting the main hyperparameters. Through these procedures, these systems are shown to be able to perform with a high degree of accuracy.

Keywords:

• Deep learning
• nuclear power plant
• surrogate system
• abnormal situation identification

Acknowledgments

This research used resources of the Center for Computational Science and E-systems (CCSE) at Japan Atomic Energy Agency.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).