Safety margins estimation method considering uncertainties within the risk-informed decision-making framework
- Dept. of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering, Polytechnic Univ. of Valencia, Cami de Vera, s/n, 46022 Valencia (Spain)
- Spanish Nuclear Safety Council, C/ Justo Dorado, 11, 28040 Madrid (Spain)
The adoption by regulators of the risk-informed decision-making philosophy has opened the debate on the role of the deterministic and probabilistic approaches to support regulatory matters of concern to NPP safety (e.g. safety margins, core damage frequency, etc.). However, the typical separation of the application fields does not imply that both methods cannot benefit from each other. On the contrary, there is a growing interest nowadays aimed at developing methods for using probabilistic safety analysis results into requirements and assumptions in deterministic analysis and vice versa. Thus, it appears an interesting challenge for the technical community aimed at combining best estimate thermal-hydraulic codes with probabilistic techniques to produce an effective and feasible technology, which should provide more realistic, complete and logical measure of reactor safety. This paper proposes a new unified framework to estimate safety margins using a best estimate thermal-hydraulic code with help of data and models from a level 1 LPSA (low power and shutdown probabilistic safety assessment - PSA) and considering simultaneously the uncertainty associated to both probabilistic and thermal-hydraulic codes. It is also presented an application example that demonstrates the performance and significance of the method and the relevance of the results achieved to the safety of nuclear power plants. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 22039628
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: PHYSOR-2006: American Nuclear Society's Topical Meeting on Reactor Physics - Advances in Nuclear Analysis and Simulation, Vancouver, BC (Canada), 10-14 Sep 2006; Other Information: Country of input: France; 14 refs.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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