A Safety Assessment Methodology for a Digital Reactor Protection System

The main function of a reactor protection system is to maintain the reactor core integrity and the reactor coolant system pressure boundary. Generally, the reactor protection system adopts the 2-out-of-m redundant architecture to assure a reliable operation. This paper describes the safety assessment of a digital reactor protection system using the fault tree analysis technique. The fault tree technique can be expressed in terms of combinations of the basic event failures such as the random hardware failures, common cause failures, operator errors, and the fault tolerance mechanisms implemented in the reactor protection system. In this paper, a prediction method of the hardware failure rate is suggested for a digital reactor protection system, and applied to the reactor protection system being developed in Korea to identify design weak points from a safety point of view.