Thermal-hydraulic unreliability of passive systems

摘要

Advanced light water reactor designs like AP600 and the simplified boiling water reactor (SBWR) use passive safety systems for accident prevention and mitigation. Because these systems rely on natural forces for their operation, their unavailability due to hardware failures and human error is significantly smaller than that of active systems. However, the coolant flows predicted to be delivered by these systems can be subject to significant uncertainties, which in turn can lead to a significant uncertainty in the predicted thermal-hydraulic performance of the plant under accident conditions. Because of these uncertainties, there is a probability that an accident sequence for which a best estimate thermal-hydraulic analysis predicts no core damage (success sequence) may actually lead to core damage. For brevity, this probability will be called thermal-hydraulic unreliability. The assessment of this unreliability for all the success sequences requires very expensive computations. Moreover, the computational cost increases drastically as the required thermal-hydraulic reliability increases. The required computational effort can be greatly reduced if a bounding approach can be used that either eliminates the need to compute thermal-hydraulic unreliabilities, or it leads to the analysis of a few bounding sequences for which the required thermal-hydraulic reliability is relatively small. The objective of this paper is to present such an approach and determine the order of magnitude of the thermal-hydraulic unreliabilities that may have to be computed.