A Research Roadmap for Computation-Based Human Reliability Analysis

Technical Report · Sat Aug 01 00:00:00 EDT 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1230074· OSTI ID:1230074

Boring, Ronald ^[1]; Mandelli, Diego ^[1]; Joe, Jeffrey ^[1]; Smith, Curtis ^[1]; Groth, Katrina ^[2]

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1. Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
2. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)

The United States (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE) is sponsoring research through the Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) program to extend the life of the currently operating fleet of commercial nuclear power plants. The Risk Informed Safety Margin Characterization (RISMC) research pathway within LWRS looks at ways to maintain and improve the safety margins of these plants. The RISMC pathway includes significant developments in the area of thermalhydraulics code modeling and the development of tools to facilitate dynamic probabilistic risk assessment (PRA). PRA is primarily concerned with the risk of hardware systems at the plant; yet, hardware reliability is often secondary in overall risk significance to human errors that can trigger or compound undesirable events at the plant. This report highlights ongoing efforts to develop a computation-based approach to human reliability analysis (HRA). This computation-based approach differs from existing static and dynamic HRA approaches in that it: (i) interfaces with a dynamic computation engine that includes a full scope plant model, and (ii) interfaces with a PRA software toolset. The computation-based HRA approach presented in this report is called the Human Unimodels for Nuclear Technology to Enhance Reliability (HUNTER) and incorporates in a hybrid fashion elements of existing HRA methods to interface with new computational tools developed under the RISMC pathway. The goal of this research effort is to model human performance more accurately than existing approaches, thereby minimizing modeling uncertainty found in current plant risk models.

• Research Organization: Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE)
• DOE Contract Number: AC07-05ID14517
• OSTI ID: 1230074
• Report Number(s): INL/EXT-15-36051; M3LW-15IN0702016
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS
COMPUTER CODES
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
ERRORS
HAZARDS
Human Unimodels for Nuclear Technology to Enhance
NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS
OPTIMIZATION
PERFORMANCE
PROBABILISTIC ESTIMATION
RAVEN
REACTOR OPERATORS
RELIABILITY
RISK ASSESSMENT
SAFETY MARGINS
SERVICE LIFE
THERMAL HYDRAULICS
WATER COOLED REACTORS
WATER MODERATED REACTORS
dynamic
human reliability analysis