Comparison of methodologies for assessing the risks from nuclear weapons and from nuclear reactors
There are important differences between the safety principles for nuclear weapons and for nuclear reactors. For example, a principal concern for nuclear weapons is to prevent electrical energy from reaching the nuclear package during accidents produced by crashes, fires, and other hazards, whereas the foremost concern for nuclear reactors is to maintain coolant around the core in the event of certain system failures. Not surprisingly, new methods have had to be developed to assess the risk from nuclear weapons. These include fault tree transformations that accommodate time dependencies, thermal and structural analysis techniques that are fast and unconditionally stable, and parameter sampling methods that incorporate intelligent searching. This paper provides an overview of the new methods for nuclear weapons and compares them with existing methods for nuclear reactors. It also presents a new intelligent searching process for identifying potential nuclear detonation vulnerabilities. The new searching technique runs very rapidly on a workstation and shows promise for providing an accurate assessment of potential vulnerabilities with far fewer physical response calculations than would be required using a standard Monte Carlo sampling procedure.
- Research Organization:
- Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC04-94AL85000
- OSTI ID:
- 270686
- Report Number(s):
- SAND-96-1471C; CONF-960912-19; ON: DE96011675; TRN: 96:017610
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: International topical meeting on probabilistic safety assessment - moving toward risk based regulation, Park City, UT (United States), 29 Sep - 3 Oct 1996; Other Information: PBD: [1996]
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Development of smart searching algorithms for vulnerability and uncertainty analyses in probabilistic risk assessments
AFWL technical objective number 1. Nuclear weapons, non-conventional weapons, direct systems support, and supporting technology, fiscal year 1979. Final technical report Jan 78--Jan 79