Speaker
Description
The FIRIA (Fire-Induced Radiological Integrated Assessment) project was launched by CERN’s HSE Unit on January 2018 to address the needs of the Organization to guarantee a suitable level of safety of its research facilities with respect to life, environment and property.
The project aims to refine the methodological and physical assumptions in use at CERN though the development of a general framework of fire risk assessment appropriate for facilities which may contain radioactive materials during their service life. The findings of the project are expected to facilitate the prioritization of consolidation activities among CERN facilities and support the choice of mitigation strategies when the risk is not acceptable. State-of-the-art knowledge in areas including materials science, fire propagation, computational fluid dynamics, dispersion of pollutants, environmental modelling, radiation protection, quantitative risk analysis and computing will be applied.
The project is driven by a multidisciplinary team composed by CERN members of the Fire Safety Engineering team (HSE-OHS-XP), Radiation Protection group (HSE-RP), Fire Brigade (HSE-FB) and CFD team (EN-CV-PJ). International collaborations have also been established and actively contribute with state-of-the-art tools and approaches with respect to, for example, large scale outdoor dispersion modelling and small-scale experimental campaign to characterize typical combustible items in terms of soot production and heat release rate.
The target area of ISOLDE (Isotope mass Separator On-Line facility) has been chosen as a pilot case, to highlight the needs of refinement in the assumptions made to date and highlight pros and cons of using a quantitative risk assessment methodology with respect to a worst case approach or a scenario analysis.
The facility is currently being assessed by the FIRIA team from the fire and fire-induced radiological release standpoints and the first results of the analysis will be presented together with an overview of the activities of the project.
