Publications Details
Level III probabilistic risk assessment for N Reactor
A Level III probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) has been performed for N Reactor, a Department of Energy (DOE) production reactor located on the Hanford reservation in Washington. The objectives of the PRA are to assess the risks to the public and the Hanford site workers posed by the operation of N Reactor, to compare those risks to proposed DOE safety goals, and to identify changes to the plant that could reduce the risk. The scope of the PRA is comprehensive, excluding only sabotage and operation errors of commission. State-of-the-art methodology is employed based largely on the methods developed by Sandia for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission in support of the NUREG-1150 study of five commercial nuclear power plants. The structure of the probabilistic models allowed complex interactions and dependencies between systems to be explicitly considered. Latin Hypercube sampling techniques were used to develop uncertainty distributions for the risks associated with postulated core damage events initiated by fire, seismic, and internal events as well as the overall combined risk. The combined risk results show that N Reactor meets the primary DOE safety goals and compared favorably to the plants considered in the NUREG-1150 analysis. 36 figs., 81 tabs.