Learning from experience ??? how can we produce a nuclear safety case to outlast the station?

摘要

Civil nuclear power stations currently on the drawing board such as the EPR and AP1000 are designed for an operating life of 60+ years. When considering the time required for approvals, potential future Station life extensions and support to decommissioning, the Safety Case may need to exist for over 100 years. Since this covers the length of several careers there will inevitably be issues regarding knowledge management, transfer of experience etc. This paper considers managing the Safety Case and keeping the Station safety documentation in a useful state, e.g. minimising effort/expenditure on updates and reducing scope for errors and conflicts in documentation and asks what should we be doing at the outset? Consideration is given to areas of experience in maintaining legacy cases such as modifications, periodic review, plant life extension, ageing/obsolescence of equipment and disaster response. In order to explore the balance between initial expenditure of time/effort versus lifetime costs consideration is given to analogies with the lifecycle model used for hardware production and Control & Instrumentation ageing and obsolescence. Based on these, a combined structured approach to the production of a Safety Case is proposed to address the issues identified.