Technical Note: On the definition of common-cause failures
- JBF Associates, Inc., Knoxville, TN (United States)
Common-cause failure (CCF) events have occurred in virtually all complex technological systems that use redundancy to help achieve high reliability. In particular, industry experience and the results of probabilistic risk assessments (PRAs) have indicated that CCFs are major contributors to the risk posed by nuclear power-plant operation. Although significant efforts are typically devoted to analyzing and preventing CCFs, no standard definition exists for CCFs-CCF means different things to different people. PRA analysts attempt to identify and treat most types of dependencies (sources of CCFs) explicitly in their PRA models; the types that are not treated explicitly are addressed in a separate CCF analysis task. Therefore, for the purpose of PRA applications, CCFs are dependent failures resulting from causes that are not explicitly modeled in the PRA.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab., TN (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 105706
- Report Number(s):
- TPJ-NS--36-No.1
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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