Necessity of Nuclear Reactor Power Uprating and Basic Study on Safety Assessment for the Power Uprating

The reexamination argument on nuclear power has arisen after the Fukushima accident. When nuclear power generation has been stopped, it is forced however, to depend on thermal power generation. In that case, the two serious problems of a jump of fuel cost and of global warming issue, that is CO2 emission issue, will be faced. So, it is still required for nuclear power generation to take an important part as basic energy source in our country. However, on the other hand, after the accident, it is very difficult to construct newly the nuclear power plant. Therefore, it is desired to carry out much more practical use of the existing nuclear power plant. One of the policies is improvement in reactor power. It is aiming at the increase in the existing reactor power in safe tolerance level. In this paper, we will describe the outline of the necessity of nuclear power uprating and also discuss basically the safety assessment for the power uprating in the case of PWR using the plant simulator