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NRC looks to leverage previous approvals for large LWRs
During this time of resurging interest in nuclear power, many conversations have centered on one fundamental problem: Electricity is needed now, but nuclear projects (in recent decades) have taken many years to get permitted and built.
In the past few years, a bevy of new strategies have been pursued to fix this problem. Workforce programs that seek to laterally transition skilled people from other industries, plans to reuse the transmission infrastructure at shuttered coal sites, efforts to restart plants like Palisades or Duane Arnold, new reactor designs that build on the legacy of research done in the early days of atomic power—all of these plans share a common throughline: leveraging work already done instead of starting over from square one to get new plants designed and built.
Risto S. Andsten, Jussi K. Vaurio
Nuclear Technology | Volume 98 | Number 2 | May 1992 | Pages 160-170
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT92-A34671
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A number of supplementary studies and applications associated with probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) are described, including sensitivity and importance evaluations of failures, errors, systems, and groups of components. The main purpose is to illustrate the usefulness of a PSA for making decisions about safety improvements, training, allowed outage times, and test intervals. A useful measure of uncertainty importance is presented, and it points out areas needing development, such as reactor vessel aging phenomena, for reducing overall uncertainty. A time-dependent core damage frequency is also presented, illustrating the impact of testing scenarios and intervals. The methods and applications presented are based on the Level 1 PSA carried out for the internal initiating events of the Loviisa 1 nuclear power station. Steam generator leakages and associated operator actions are major contributors to the current core-damage frequency estimate of 2 × 10-4/yr. The results are used to improve the plant and procedures and to guide future improvements.