Feasibility of risk-informed regulation for Generation-IV reactors

With the advent of new and innovative Generation-IV reactor designs, new regulations must be developed to assure the safety of these plants. In the past a purely deterministic way of developing design basis accidents was prevalent, however this is felt to not be satisfactory, since this leaves insufficient safety restrictions in certain areas, while being overly restrictive in others, not being able to optimize where the safety constraints are truly needed. Currently the USNRC is investigating how one might go about this approach, but no method is finalized. In this paper, a methodology for creating risk-informed design basis accidents is developed. This not only incorporates the Surrogate Risk Guidelines developed by the USNRC for each overall accident initiator the plant may experience, but helps to select which sequences are the most important to that initiator, and from that develop a set of risk-informed assumptions that form the basis of the design basis accident. This method was applied to the test case of the Massachusetts Institute of 'Technology' s Gas-Fast Reactor (GFR) design, as considerable risk-informed design work has been carried out on various initiators for this design (including Turbine Trip, Loss-of-Coolant Accident, and Loss-of-Offsite Power).

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Matos, Craig H

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• George E. Apostolakis.

• Nuclear Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34446

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34446