'Walk-away safe' / inherently safe

A marketing phrase, not a defined technical term, used by some reactor developers to describe designs whose passive safety features are strong enough that no operator action is needed for an extended period after certain accidents. It rests on the same underlying facts as any passive safety claim, chiefly decay heat and reactivity coefficients, and should be checked the same way: for which accidents, for how long, and against what numbers. The related engineering idea, inherent safety, is narrower: it means a particular hazard has been removed by the choice of materials or design, such as a coolant that cannot boil at the reactor's operating pressure, not that the whole plant is safe in every circumstance. The dataset records such statements as the company's own words, not as an independently established property of the design.

Vocabulary id

concept:walk-away-safe

Scheme

Concepts

Back to the glossary.