Long-term prediction of safety parameters with uncertainty estimation in emergency situations at nuclear power plants

• Published in: Nuclear engineering and technology Vol. 55; no. 5; pp. 1630 - 1643
• Main Authors: Kim, Hyojin, Kim, Jonghyun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.05.2023; Elsevier; 한국원자력학회
• Subjects: Attention mechanism; Bidirectional long short-term memory; Conditional variational autoencoder; Long-term prediction; Uncertainty estimation; 원자력공학; Conditional variational autoencoder; Attention mechanism; Uncertainty estimation; Bidirectional long short-term memory; Long-term prediction
• ISSN: 1738-5733; 2234-358X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.net.2023.01.026

The correct situation awareness (SA) of operators is important for managing nuclear power plants (NPPs), particularly in accident-related situations. Among the three levels of SA suggested by Ensley, Level 3 SA (i.e., projection of the future status of the situation) is challenging because of the complexity of NPPs as well as the uncertainty of accidents. Hence, several prediction methods using artificial intelligence techniques have been proposed to assist operators in accident prediction. However, these methods only predict short-term plant status (e.g., the status after a few minutes) and do not provide information regarding the uncertainty associated with the prediction. This paper proposes an algorithm that can predict the multivariate and long-term behavior of plant parameters for 2 h with 120 steps and provide the uncertainty of the prediction. The algorithm applies bidirectional long short-term memory and an attention mechanism, which enable the algorithm to predict the precise long-term trends of the parameters with high prediction accuracy. A conditional variational autoencoder was used to provide uncertainty information about the network prediction. The algorithm was trained, optimized, and validated using a compact nuclear simulator for a Westinghouse 900 MWe NPP.