FIRE PRA MATURITY AND REALISM: A DISCUSSION AND SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVEMENT

摘要

Fire PRA has often been characterized as being less mature and less realistic than internal events PRA. Perceptions of immaturity can affect stakeholders' use of fire PRA information. Unrealistic fire PRA results could affect fire-safety related decisions and improperly skew comparisons of risk contributions from different hazards. In this paper, we address the issue of technical maturity through the identification of a number of key indicators and the issue of realism through quantitative and qualitative comparisons of fire PRA results with operational event data. Based on our analysis, we judge that fire PRA is in an intermediate-to-late stage of maturity (albeit less mature than internal events analysis) and that fire PRAs, as performed using current guidance, may be providing conservative quantitative results. However, our results cannot confidently support estimates of the degree of conservatism. We also observe that the qualitative results of fire PRAs are generally consistent with operational experience. We conclude with a number of suggestions for activities to enhance fire PRA realism.