Analyses of reliability characteristics of emergency diesel generator population using empirical Bayes methods

摘要

Emergency Diesel Generators (EDGs) provide backup power to nuclear power plants in case of failure of AC buses. The reliability of EDGs is important to assure response to loss-of-offsite power accident scenarios, a dominant contributor to the plant risk. The reliable performance of EDGs has been of concern both for regulators and plant operators. In this paper the authors present an approach and results from the analysis of failure data from a large population of EDGs. They used empirical Bayes approach to obtain both the population distribution and the individual failure probabilities from EDGs failure to start and load-run data over 4 years for 194 EDGs at 63 plant units.