Application of importance measures to nuclear reactor systems and the development of systems performance standards based on probabilistic risk assessments
Thesis/Dissertation
·
OSTI ID:6180776
Probabilistic Risk Assessments (PRA) of nuclear reactors now represent a substantial data base that describes relative plant accident potentials, plant failure modes, and plant system failure probabilities. The PRA analyses can be used to make design related decisions. In general, however, nuclear plant design relies on traditional engineering approaches along with quality control and regulatory review. A method is proposed here whereby typical PRA methods can be used to develop design related standards for plant core melt and subsystem performance. The approach taken used system and plant failure data from six pressurized water reactor (PWR) PRAs. Importance measures were applied to gage the impact of various systems on plant core melt. These measures were also applied to modified plant configurations which met a dominant sequence core melt contribution limit of 1.0 x 10/sup -5/ core melts per plant per reactor year. In addition, plant failure modes were put into functional groups, and sequences were placed into accident classes. Together, these approaches defined the failure characteristics of the six plants and sought to discern the existence of performance standards. Overall, it was found that plant failure modes were extremely diverse, reflecting the unique characteristics of all six of the PWRs.
- Research Organization:
- California Univ., Los Angeles (USA)
- OSTI ID:
- 6180776
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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