PSAM 18 — International Conference on Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Management
A contribution from the FRI3D team was accepted for PSAM 18, the International Conference on Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Management, held at the Omni William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 19–24 July 2026.
Effect on Habitability from Sodium Pool Fires in a Small Modular Reactor Room
Ramprasad Sampath (Centroid LAB) and Curtis Smith (MIT)
Internal fires remain a major contributor to overall plant risk in nuclear power plants, which keeps fire probabilistic risk assessment (Fire PRA/PSA) central to design and regulatory decisions. The FRI3D framework integrates fire modeling tools with cable-failure models in a single 3D environment. This work applies that framework to the smoke produced by sodium pool fires in liquid-metal-cooled small modular reactor (SMR) compartments: experimentally derived sodium burning rates and heat-release-rate curves informed by tools such as SOFIRE-II are used as source terms for FDS simulation. The results give spatial and temporal distributions of smoke optical density, which are used to assess operator visibility and habitability, and are visualized directly in FRI3D's 3D interface.
Why it matters: sodium pool fires behave unlike the hydrocarbon fires most fire-PRA guidance is built around, and their smoke drives habitability and operator-action assumptions. Modeling optical density in 3D makes those assumptions checkable rather than assumed.
Keywords: Sodium pool fire · Smoke optical density · Habitability · Small Modular Reactors · FRI3D · FDS · SOFIRE-II
View the abstract on the PSAM 18 site — accepted as abstract and presentation; no conference paper.
Bringing FRI3D to fire PRA for your nuclear or SMR facility? Learn more at fri3d.com or get in touch.