Demonstration of Integrated Hazard Analysis for Digital Reactor Trip Systems

Conference · Tue Nov 19 04:00:00 EST 2019

OSTI ID:1970006

Shorthill, Tate ^[1]; Zhang, Hongbin ^[2]; Ban, Heng ^[1]; Bao, Han ^[2]

---

1. University of Pittsburgh
2. Idaho National Laboratory

Digital instrumentation and control (I&C) upgrades are a vital research area for nuclear industry. Despite their performance benefits, deployment of digital I&C in nuclear power plants (NPPs) has been limited. Digital I&C systems exhibit complex failure modes including common cause failures (CCFs) which can be difficult to identify. This paper describes the development of a redundancy-guided application of the Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) for the hazard analysis of digital I&C in advanced NPPs. The resulting Redundancy-guided System-theoretic Hazard Analysis (RESHA) is applied for the case study of a representative state-of-the-art digital reactor trip system. The analysis qualitatively and systematically identifies the most critical CCFs and other hazards of digital I&C systems. Ultimately, RESHA can help researchers make informed decisions for how, and to what degree, defensive measures such as redundancy, diversity, and defense-in-depth can be used to mitigate or eliminate the potential hazards of digital I&C systems.

• Research Organization: Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security (AU)
• DOE Contract Number: AC07-05ID14517
• OSTI ID: 1970006
• Report Number(s): INL/MIS-19-56515-Rev000
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Hazard analysis
advanced nuclear power plants
digital instrumentation and control
redundancy-guided