A New Graphical Dismantling Process Simulation Technology for Flexible Planning of Nuclear Facility
The dismantling of highly radioactive components of the nuclear facility is one of the most difficult activities in decommissioning. In the planning stage, the dismantling scenario including dismantling equipment and processes has a significant effect on the cost and safety of the whole decommissioning. High level radiation of the dismantling object such as a reactor pressure vessel (RPV) and its internals restricts access by human workers, and makes an accident during the dismantling process more difficult to deal with. Decommissioning of nuclear facilities demand a large scale of budget and high level of safety, and therefore the preliminary verification of dismantling scenarios by graphical simulation has special importance at planning stage. In recent years, the manufacturing industry has aggressively adopted the virtual manufacturing technology to verify the facilities and processes with high efficiency. The virtual manufacturing technology was beginning to be adopted in the area of the nuclear facility decommissioning. The dismantling process of the Rotary Specimen Rack (RSR) in the Korea Research Reactor-1 and 2 was established and it was also applied to replace the steam generators on time and on budget in San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. Current virtual manufacturing technologies are not sufficient for the area of nuclear facility decommissioning because the object segmenting function absolutely required for graphical simulations over various dismantling scenarios is unavailable. This paper proposes a new technology for graphical decommissioning simulator which is able to simulate various dismantling scenarios over nuclear facilities including repetitive object cuttings of heavy and complex structures by applying flexible cutting algorithm.