Pipe Break Frequency Estimation for Nuclear Power Plants.

摘要

The study empirically develops frequencies of safety-significant pipe failures in commercial nuclear power plants (NPPs). Its primary purpose is to update the pipe break frequencies reported in the Reactor Safety Study, WASH-1400, which are used in many risk analyses. The study involved reviewing various data sources for actual piping failure events of significant magnitude. When extant in the documentation reviewed, information was extracted concerning conditional factors such as the system in which the failure occurred, operational mode of the plant, and size of the pipe involved to estimate conditional pipe break frequencies useful to risk analysts. Because of the high quality piping used in NPPs, there have been few significant pipe failures. An attempt was made to augment the analysis with synthetic data from a Delphi approach, but the wide uncertainty bounds on the resulting estimates rendered the results unsuitable for combining data.