• 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.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.63-74
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• 2015

This study investigated the influence of probabilistic variability in stiffness and nonlinearity of soil on response of nuclear power plant (NPP) structure subjected to seismic loads considering the soil-structure interaction (SSI). Both deterministic and probabilistic methods have been employed to evaluate the dynamic responses of the structure. For the deterministic method, $SRP_{min}$ method given in USNRC SRP 3.7.2(2013) (envelope of responses using three shear modulus profiles of lower bound($G_{LB}$), best estimate($G_{BE}$) and upper bound($G_{UB}$)) and $SRP_{max}$ method (envelope of responses by more than three ground profiles within range of $G_{LB}{\leq}G{\leq}G_{UB}$) have been considered. The probabilistic method uses the Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) that can capture probabilistic feature of soil stiffness defined by the median and the standard deviation. These analysis results indicated that 1) number of samples shall be larger than 60 to apply the probabilistic approach in SSI analysis and 2) in-structure response spectra using equivalent linear soil profiles considering the nonlinear behavior of soil medium can be larger than those based on low-strain soil profiles.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.596-604
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• 2001

This paper quantitatively presents the effects of important factors of the probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) of safety-critical digital systems. The result which is quantified using fault tree analysis methodology shows that these factors remarkably affect the system safety. In this paper we list the factors which should be represented by the model for PSA. Based on the PSA experience, we select three important factors which are expected to dominate the system unavailability. They are the avoidance of common cause failure, the coverage of fault tolerant mechanisms and software failure probability. We Quantitatively demonstrate the effect of these three factors. The broader usage of digital equipment in nuclear power plants gives rise to the safety problems. Even though conventional PSA methods are immature for applying to microprocessor-based digital systems, practical needs force us to apply it because the result of PSA plays an important role in proving the safety of a designed system. We expect the analysis result to provide valuable feedback to the designers of digital safety- critical systems.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.66-73
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• 2021

This report documents the results of an at-power internal events Level 1 Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) for a Korea research reactor (KRR). The aim of the study is to determine the accident sequences, construct an internal level 1 PSA model, and estimate the core damage frequency (CDF). The accident quantification is performed using the AIMS-PSA software version 1.2c along with a fault tree reliability evaluation expert (FTREX) quantification engine. The KRR PSA model is quantified using a cut-off value of 1.0E-15/yr to eliminate the non-effective minimal cut sets (MCSs). The final result indicates a point estimate of 4.55E-06/yr for the overall CDF attributable to internal initiating events in the core damage state for the KRR. Loss of Electric Power (LOEP) is the predominant contributor to the total CDF via a single initiating event (3.68E-6/yr), providing 80.9% of the CDF. The second largest contributor is the beam tube loss of coolant accident (LOCA), which accounts for 9.9% (4.49E-07/yr) of the CDF.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.2047-2052
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• 2023

Risk-informed approach has been widely applied in the safety design, regulation, and operation of nuclear reactors. It has been commonly accepted that risk-informed design optimization should be used in the innovative reactor designs to make nuclear system highly safe and reliable. In spite of the risk-informed approach has been used in some advanced nuclear reactors designs, such as Westinghouse IRIS, Gen-IV sodium fast reactors and lead-based fast reactors, the process of risk-informed design of nuclear reactors is hardly to carry out when passive system reliability should be integrated in the framework. A practical method for new passive safety reactors based on probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) and passive system reliability analyze linking is proposed in this paper. New three-dimension frequency-consequence curve based on risk concept with three variables is used in this method. The proposed method has been applied to the determination optimization of design options selection in a 10 MWth lead-based research reactor(LR) to obtain one optimized system design in conceptual design stage, using the integrated reliability and probabilistic safety assessment program RiskA, and the computation resources and time consumption in this process was demonstrated reasonable and acceptable.

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 1998.05a
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• pp.862-868
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• 1998

Korean Next Generation Reactor(KNGR) is a standardized evolutionary Advanced Light Water Reactor design under development Korea Power Company(KEPCO). It incorporates design enhncements such as active and passive advanced design features(ADFs) to increase the plant safety. A Preliminary level 1 Probabilistic Safety Assessment(PSA) has been performed for KNGR to examine the effect of these safety features. The preliminary PSA result shows that it meets the KNGR safety goal on core damage frequency(CDF). The result of this safety assessment shows that the four-train safety systems, and the ADFs such as Passive Secondary Cooling System (PSCS) contributes greatly to the reduction the CDF. Furthermore, several design changes are made or proposed for detailed review based on the PSA insights.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.31-38
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• 2018

Earthquake disasters that exceed the design criteria can pose significant threats to nuclear facilities. Seismic probabilistic safety assessment(PSA) is a probabilistic way to quantify such risks. Accordingly, seismic PSA has been applied to domestic and overseas nuclear power plants, and the safety of nuclear power plants was evaluated and prepared against earthquake hazards. However, there were few examples where seismic PSA was applied in case of a research reactor with a relatively small size compared to nuclear power plants. Therefore, in this study, seismic PSA technique was applied to actually completed research reactor to analyze its safety. Also, based on these results, the optimization study on the seismic capacity of the system constituting the research reactor was carried out. As a result, the possibility of damage to the core caused by the earthquake hazard was quantified in the research reactor and its safety was confirmed. The optimization study showed that the optimal seismic capacity distribution was obtained to ensure maximum safety at a low cost compared with the current design. These results, in the future, can expect to be used as a quantitative indicator to effectively improve the safety of the research reactor with respect to earthquakes.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.175-182
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• 2008

In this paper, through the study and consideration of the recently prominent monitoring of cable stayed-bridge, practical but reasonable suggested for the evaluation of the probabilistic safety of the bridges using probable measured data from monitoring measurement system. It is shown in the paper that the live load effects can be evaluated using measured data of cable-stayed bridge and this the realistic probabilistic safety of the cable-stayed bridge could be assessed in term of element reliability and system reliability. As a practical method for the evalution of the system reliability of system cable-stayed bridges partial ETA method is uesd, which can find the critical failure path including combined failure modes of cable, deck and pylon. Compared with the conventional safety analysis method, the propsed approach may be considered as the practical method that shows the considerably actual and reasonable results the system redundancy of the structure.

• The Korean Journal of Pesticide Science
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.110-115
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• 2010

The aim of this study is to investigate the exposure assessment of Korean consumers to five neonicotinoid pesticides in fruit vegetables cultivated in Korea, using a probabilistic approach. We used five neonicotionid pesticides residues(acetamiprid, clothianidin, imidacloprid, thiacloprid, thiamethoxam) data in fruit vegetables reported by Rural Development Administration for the 2009 monitoring programme. Total exposure of five neonicotinoid pesticides for Korean consumer ranged from 0.087 to 0.236 ${\mu}g$/kg/day at the $95^{th}$ percentile. The $95^{th}$ percentile values of total exposure of five neonicotinoid pesticides by probabilistic approach were lower than those by deterministic approach, although mean values of total exposure by probabilistic approach were similar with those of total exposure by deterministic approach. Total exposure to acetamiprid residue may be mainly due to the exposure to acetamiprid through the consumption of strawberry. Also, acetamiprid residues in strawberry were considered as much more contributory factor to total exposure of acetamiprid than consumption data of strawberry. This contributory properties of acetamiprid were similar with those of all other neonicotinoid pesticides, excluding thiacloprid.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.271-280
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• 2002

A probabilistic approach to identify the effects of uncertainties of soil strength parameters on searching a critical slip surface with the lowest reliability is introduced. In general construction field, it is impossible for the engineer to always gather a variety of statistical information of soil strength parameters for which lots of laboratory and in-situ soil testing are required and to use it with enough statistical knowledge. Thus, in order that the engineer may easily understand the probabilistic concept for the slope stability analysis, this study proposes a combined procedure to incorporate the engineering probabilistic tools into the existing deterministic slope stability analysis methods. Using UTEXAS 3, a slope stability analysis computer program developed by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (U.S. COE), this study provides the results of this probabilistic slope stability analysis in terms of probability of failure or reliability index. This probabilistic method f3r slope stability analysis appears to yield more comprehensive results of slope reliability than does existing deterministic methods with safety factors alone.