• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.12
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• pp.2812-2820
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• 2020

House load operation (HLO) occurs when the generator supplies power to the house load without triggering reactor trips during grid disturbances. In Korea, the HLO capability of optimized power reactor 1000 (OPR1000) plants has prevented several reactor trips. Operational experiences demonstrate the difference in the reactor trip incidence due to grid disturbances between OPR1000 plants and Westinghouse plants in Korea, attributable to the availability of the HLO capability. However, probabilistic safety assessments (PSAs) for OPR1000 plants have not considered their specific design features in the initiating event analyses. In an at-power PSA, the HLO capability can affect the initiating event frequencies of general transients (GTRN) and loss of offsite power (LOOP), resulting from transients within the grid system. The initiating event frequencies of GTRN and LOOP for an OPR1000 plant are reduced by 17.7% and 78.7%, respectively, compared to the Korean industry-average initiating event frequencies, and its core damage frequency from internal events is reduced by 15.2%. The explicit consideration of the HLO capability in initiating event analyses makes significant changes in the risk contributions of the initiating events. Consequently, for more realistic at-power PSAs in Korea, we recommend incorporating plant-specific HLO-related design features when estimating initiating event frequencies.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.177-184
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• 1999

PSA(Probabilistic Safety Assessment) methodology is widely used on assessing the safety of Nuclear Power Plants(NPPs) quantitatively in the domestic nuclear field. Initiating event frequencies are absolutely needed to conduct PSA, and they considerably affect PSA results. There is no domestic database where domestic trip event cases are reflected, so they are used to assess the safety of NPPs that are from the foreign database. In this paper, operating experience data from the Korean NPPs was collected and analyzed for the trip event cases, which are necessary to determine the initiating events and their frequencies. Korean NPPs have experienced five of 16 initiating events, which we LOFW. LOCV, LOCCW, LOOP and GTRN as a result of analyzing the trip event cases. Initiating frequencies based on the domestic trip event cases are analyzed, and they are similar to that from the foreign database.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.101-110
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• 2021

This paper presents the results of an initiating event analysis as part of a Level 1 probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) for at-power internal events for the Korea Research Reactor (KRR). The PSA methodology is widely used to quantitatively assess the safety of research reactors (RRs) in the domestic nuclear industry. Initiating event frequencies are required to conduct a PSA, and they considerably affect the PSA results. Because there is no domestic database for domestic trip events, the safety of RRs is usually assessed using foreign databases. In this paper, operating experience data from the KRR for trip events were collected and analyzed in order to determine the frequency of specific initiating events. These frequencies were calculated using two approaches according to the event characteristics and data availability: (1) based on KRR operating experience or (2) using generic data.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.187-194
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• 2016

A single fire event within a fire area can cause multiple initiating events considered in internal events probabilistic safety assessment (PSA). For an example, a fire event in turbine building fire area can cause a loss of the main feed-water and loss of off-site power initiating events. This fire initiating event could result in special plant responses beyond the scope of the internal events PSA model. One approach to address a fire initiating event is to develop a specific fire event tree. However, the development of a specific fire event tree is difficult since the number of fire event trees may be several hundreds or more. Thus, internal fire events PSA model has been generally constructed by modifications of the pre-developed internal events PSA model. New accident sequence logics not covered in the internal events PSA model are separately developed to incorporate them into the fire PSA model. Recently, many fire PSA models have fire induced initiating event fault trees not shown in an internal event PSA model. Up to now, there has been no analytical comparative study on the constructions of fire events PSA model using internal events PSA model with and without fault trees of initiating events. In this study, the changing process of internal events PSA model to fire events PSA model is analytically presented and discussed.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.1
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• pp.211-221
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• 2020

One fundamental element of probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) is the initiating event (IE) analysis. Since IE frequencies can change over time, time-trend analysis is required to obtain optimized IE frequencies. Accordingly, such time-trend analyses have been employed to estimate industry-average IE frequencies for use in the PSAs of U.S. nuclear power plants (NPPs); existing PSAs of Korean NPPs, however, neglect such analysis in the estimation of IE frequencies. This article therefore provides the method for and results of estimating Korean industry-average IE frequencies using time-trend analysis. It also examines the effects of the IE frequencies obtained from this study on risk insights by applying them to recently updated internal events Level 1 PSA models (at-power and shutdown) for an OPR-1000 plant. As a result, at-power core damage frequency decreased while shutdown core damage frequency increased, with the related contributions from each IE category changing accordingly. These results imply that the incorporation of time-trend analysis leads to different IE frequencies and resulting risk insights. The IE frequency distributions presented in this study can be used in future PSA updates for Korean NPPs, and should be further updated themselves by adding more recent data.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.498-508
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• 2021

Micro reactors are increasingly being considered for utilization as distributed power sources. Hence, the probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) of a direct supercritical-CO₂-cooled fast reactor, called micro modular reactor (MMR), was performed in this study; this reactor was developed using innovative design concepts. It adopted a modular design and passive safety systems to minimize site constraints. As the MMR is in its conceptual design phase, design weaknesses and valuable safety insights could be identified during PSA. Level 1 internal event PSA was carried out involving literature survey, system characterization, identification of initiating events, transient analyses, development of event trees and fault trees, and quantification. The initiating events and scenarios significantly contributing to core damage frequency (CDF) were determined to identify design weaknesses in MMR. The most significant initiating event category contributing to CDF was the transients with the power conversion system initially available category, owing to its relatively high occurrence frequency. Further, an importance analysis revealed that the safety of MMR can be significantly improved by improving the reliability of reactor trip and passive decay heat removal system operation. The findings presented in this paper are expected to contribute toward future applications of PSA for assessing unconventional nuclear reactors in their conceptual design phases.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.27-33
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• 2017

This study is intended to identify issues on the basis of investigating the actual state of laboratory environment and outlet circuit, and derive end states by expressing sequences from the initiating event of disaster to accident in leakage current, poor contact and overload through ETA(event tree analysis). To this end, this study investigated the actual state of electric equipment of laboratory at universities in all parts of country. And it is shown that most of them are failure in electric work and user negligence in the investigation of actual state. It is found that there is earth fault and defect in wire diameter in the failure of electric work and the problem of partial disconnection due to wire bundling and poor contact in user negligence. Outlet-related component, failure rate and initiating events are composed of a total of 41 initiating events, i.e., 30 internal initiating events and 11 external initiating events. And end states are composed of a total of 15 parts, i.e., 3 electric power parts and 12 safety parts. Earthing class 3 is the most important safety device against leakage current (initiating event). And in case of poor contact, it is necessary for manager to check thoroughly because there is no safety device. In case of overload/overcurrent, when high-capacity equipment is connected, a molded case circuit breaker, safety device, worked. However, in most cases, it is verified that this doesn't work. This study can be utilized as electric equipment safety guide for laboratory safety manager and managers.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.187-195
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• 2015

Human-induced initiating events, also called Category B actions in human reliability analysis, are operator actions that may lead directly to initiating events. Most conventional probabilistic safety analyses typically assume that the frequency of initiating events also includes the probability of human-induced initiating events. However, some regulatory documents require Category B actions to be specifically analyzed and quantified in probabilistic safety analysis. An explicit modeling of Category B actions could also potentially lead to important insights into human performance in terms of safety. However, there is no standard procedure to identify Category B actions. This paper describes a systematic procedure to identify Category B actions for low power and shutdown conditions. The procedure includes several steps to determine operator actions that may lead to initiating events in the low power and shutdown stages. These steps are the selection of initiating events, the selection of systems or components, the screening of unlikely operating actions, and the quantification of initiating events. The procedure also provides the detailed instruction for each step, such as operator's action, information required, screening rules, and the outputs. Finally, the applicability of the suggested approach is also investigated by application to a plant example.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.271-278
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• 2011

When performing fire PSA in a nuclear power plant, an event mapping method, using an internal event PSA model, is widely used to reduce the resources used by fire PSA model development. Feasible initiating events and component failure events due to fire are identified to transform the fault tree (FT) for an internal event PSA into one for a fire PSA using the event mapping method. A surrogate event or damage term method is used to condition the FT of the internal PSA. The surrogate event or the damage term plays the role of flagging whether the system/component in a fire compartment is damaged or not, depending on the fire being initiated from a specified compartment. These methods usually require explicit states of all compartments to be modeled in a fire area. Fire event scenarios, when using explicit identification, such as surrogate or damage terms, have two problems: (1) there is no consideration of multiple fire propagation beyond a single propagation to an adjacent compartment, and (2) there is no consideration of simultaneous fire propagations in which an initiating fire event is propagated to multiple paths simultaneously. The present paper suggests a fire propagation equation to identify all possible fire event scenarios for an explicitly treated fire event scenario in the fire PSA. Also, a method for separating fire events was developed to make all fire events a set of mutually exclusive events, which can facilitate arithmetic summation in fire risk quantification. A simple example is given to confirm the applicability of the present method for a $2{\times}3$ rectangular fire area. Also, a feasible asymptotic approach is discussed to reduce the computational burden for fire risk quantification.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.102-110
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• 2019

This paper describes the work and results of the preliminary Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) for a research reactor in the design phase. This preliminary PSA 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 described here is a Level 1 PSA which addresses the risks associated with core damage. After reviewing the documents and its conceptual design, eight typical initiating events are selected regarding internal events during the normal operation of the reactor. Simple fault tree models for the PSA are developed instead of the detailed model at this conceptual design stage. A total of 32 core damage accident sequences for an internal event analysis were identified and quantified using the AIMS-PSA. LOCA-I has a dominant contribution to the total CDF by a single initiating event. The CDF from the internal events of a research reactor is estimated to be 7.38E-07/year. The CDF for the representative initiating events is less than 1.0E-6/year even though conservative assumptions are used in reliability data. The conceptual design of the research reactor is designed to be sufficiently safe from the viewpoint of safety.