Abstract
This paper describes design improvement to a research rector for safety enhancement using Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA). This PSA under reactor design was undertaken to assess the level of safety for the design of a research reactor and to evaluate whether it is probabilistically safe to operate and reliable to use. The scope of the PSA reported here is a Level 1 PSA, which addresses the risks associated with the core damage. The technical objectives of this study were to identify accident sequences leading to core damage and to derive design improvement from the dominant accident sequences through the sensitivity analysis. The AIMS-PSA and FTREX were used for the this PSA of the research reactor. The criterion for inclusion was all sequences with a point estimate frequency greater than a truncation value of 1.0E-14/yr. The final result indicates a point estimate of 6.79E-05/yr for the overall Core Damage Frequency (CDF) attributable to internal initiating events for the research reactor under design. Based on the dominant accident sequences from the PSA, the seven kinds of sensitivity analysis were performed and some design improvement items were derived. When the five methods to improve the safety were all applied to the reactor design and emergency operating procedure, its risk was reduced to about 1.21E-06/yr from 6.79E-05/yr. The contribution of LOCA and LOEP with high CDF were significantly reduced by the sensitivity analysis. The safety of the research reactor was well improved and the risk was reduced than before adapting the design improvement gotten from the sensitivity analysis. The present study indicated that the research reactor has the well-balanced safety in regard to each initiating event contribution to CDF. The PSA methodology is very effective to improve reactor safety in a conceptual design phase and especially, Risk-informed design(RID) is very nice way to find the deficiencies of research reactor under design and to improve the reactor safety by solving them.
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