Risk analysis and safe reactor operations

Lecturer 2010 (Credit for much material development): Lemmer Lusse (MSc Eng) : NECSA
Lecturer 2012: Hennie Minnaar : BIRA

Course Outline

The definition of a full scope PRA includes consideration of all internal and external events, and considers these events for all sources of radionuclides (reactor, spent/used fuel storage, waste treatment systems), it also considers the Fatality risk for public and worker, and events occurring at all plant operating states. In this course, we will cover internal events, affecting only the reactor, for the "at Power" plant operating state, and only consider the evolution of events up to core damage frequency (so called a Level 1 study). The topics to cover will therefore include the following:

• SA Regulatory requirements, how the elements of a full scope PRA fit together, limited scope of the lecture, Objectives of the PRA
• Internal initiating event identification and quantification
• Event sequence development (end state definitions, functional event tree, fundamental safety functions, detailed event tree, dependencies)
• System Fault tree development (top event definition, logic gates, Boolean Algebra)
• Reliability data (reliability models, parameter estimation, data sources -generic and plant specific)
• Common cause failure analysis (common cause models, data, sources)
• Human reliability (types of failures, models & methods)
• Fault tree quantification
• Event tree quantification
• Sensitivity and Uncertainty analysis (Aleatory and epistemic uncertainty)
• PRA applications
• PRA quality standards

Lectures

• Lesson Plan
• Study Guide and lecture material available in the restricted section - For registered students
• Interesting links
  • Probabilistic Risk Assessment
  • IAEA Training Materials on Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) Level 1 and Applications:
  • IAEA Training Materials on Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) Level 2:
  • EPRI – Education of Risk Professionals Module 1 , EPRI Technical Report, EPRI 2009:
• Interesting Documents
  • NS-58.21-2007 External-Events PRA Methodology
  • Apostolakis article on PRA
  • ASME RA-Sa-2009 clean
  • Canada-Safety Analysis and Design
  • Dutch RED Book - Methods for determining and processing probabilities
  • EPRI Tech Report - US Fire events DB and Model
  • Expert opinion process - INL
  • NNR documents part
  • NUREG 1764
  • NUREG 1792 HRA
  • NUREG 1855 app A
  • NUREG_0711_sr0711r2

Tutorials

• Tutorial 1
• Tutorial 2
• Tutorial 3

Projects

• Project 1

Restricted Material

• For registered students