Revising the Emergency Management Requirements for new generation reactors

•A risk-informed methodology is presented to identify the EMR.•The methodology is applied to a Generation II, large size reactor.•The methodology is applied to a Generation III+, Small–Medium Modular Reactor.•The results are consistent with the current regulation, for the GenII reactor.•A reduction of the emergency planning area is possible, for the GenIII+ reactor.

The paper presents the application of a new risk-informed methodology for the identification of the Emergency Management Requirements (EMR) to a Generation II, Large size Reactor and a Generation III+ Small Modular Reactor.The results obtained in this test case demonstrate that the actual EMR is conservative, as expected, for the GenII reactor, while the new methodology could be applied for the definition of EMRs for the new generation Nuclear Power Plants, with a possible reduction of the emergency area without loss of safety level.By adopting both probabilistic and deterministic approaches, the study addresses possible accidents and corresponding release scenarios for the two types of reactor, calculates the areas where the accidents have an impact on the population and defines the new EMR considering the health effects on the population.