Seismic Isolation of Reactor Assembly for a Fixed Base - Accelerator Driven System Reactor Building

In the SILER (Seismic-Initiated events risk mitigation in LEad-cooled Reactors) Project, it is interesting to apply seismic isolation technology for the reactor assembly of the fixed base reactor building for ADS (Acceleration Driven System) heavy liquid reactor MYRRHA (Multipurpose Hybrid Research Reactor for High-Tech Application) which contains the most critical safety related components, such as reactor vessel, safe shutdown and control rod mechanisms, primary heat exchangers, primary pumps, spallation target assembly and fuel assemblies, etc.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possibility of an application of a partial seismic isolation to the safety critical components only, here, the reactor assembly.
This paper presents the preliminary analysis results of the isolated reactor assembly and compares these with those of seismic isolated ADS reactor building. The analysis results show the reduction of the seismic acceleration response but the increase of the relative displacement for the reactor assembly.
Some safety issues, especially, coolant’s incapable covering the reactor core make difficult to apply for the partial seismic isolation of the ADS reactor assembly due to large relative displacement occurring the partial isolation system.
Further study on the partial seismic isolation application of the critical safety components are also discussed.