Passive Safety System Reliability Analysis: Methodology, Application, and Results

Conference · Tue Apr 25 04:00:00 EDT 2023

OSTI ID:2283504

Bucknor, M.; Grabaskas, D.; Brunett, A. J.; Henneke, Dennis; Li, Jonathan

Many advanced reactor designs rely on passive systems to provide assurance that certain safety functions, such as reactivity control and reactor heat removal, are maintained during transient scenarios. The performance of these systems is sensitive to boundary and environmental conditions and can lead to functional failure, which is the inability of the system to perform as intended even without any physical failures. Additionally, conditions can cause the passive systems to operate in an intermediate or degraded state. These operational modes of passive systems and their overall reliability can be difficult to capture in traditional probabilistic frameworks where discrete operating modes are assumed or time-dependent boundary conditions are not accounted for. Novel strategies and methods are needed to be able to capture the reliability of these passive systems and their impact on facility safety. The current abstract provides a summary of such a methodology and examples of its use in a case study, the GE Hitachi (GEH) PRISM probabilistic safety assessment (PSA), and the U.S. Department of Energy (USDOE) Versatile Test Reactor (VTR) PSA.

• Research Organization: Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy; USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy - Office of Nuclear Reactor Technologies - Advanced Reactor Technologies (ART)
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-06CH11357
• OSTI ID: 2283504
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English