Do-Young Ko

Central Research Institute, Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co., Ltd.

Republic of Korea

1. Introduction

A nuclear power plant takes approximately 52-58 months from the first concrete construction until the completion of the performance test. Many research groups throughout the world have studied ways to shorten the construction period of nuclear power plants to 50 months. Therefore, the construction period of a nuclear power plant is one of the most important factors to make a company competitive in international nuclear energy markets. There are many advanced construction methods to decrease the construction period for new nuclear power plants. This chapter is related to the modularization of reactor vessel internals (RVI) that one of the most effective methods to reduce the construction period of nuclear power plants (Ko et al., 2009) (Ko & Lee, 2010) (Ko, 2011) (Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co., Ltd., 2009).