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Sizewell B gets 20-year life extension; SMR agreements signed around the world
Sizewell B, on the Suffolk coast of England, has been granted a 20-year life extension. The nuclear power plant, which began operating in 1995, will now remain in operation until 2055. Sizewell B owner and operator EDF Energy agreed to make extra investments to maintain the facility, with additional investment funds coming from Centrica, which owns a 20 percent share in EDF’s U.K. reactors.
Risto S. Andsten, Jussi K. Vaurio
Nuclear Technology | Volume 98 | Number 2 | May 1992 | Pages 160-170
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT92-A34671
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A number of supplementary studies and applications associated with probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) are described, including sensitivity and importance evaluations of failures, errors, systems, and groups of components. The main purpose is to illustrate the usefulness of a PSA for making decisions about safety improvements, training, allowed outage times, and test intervals. A useful measure of uncertainty importance is presented, and it points out areas needing development, such as reactor vessel aging phenomena, for reducing overall uncertainty. A time-dependent core damage frequency is also presented, illustrating the impact of testing scenarios and intervals. The methods and applications presented are based on the Level 1 PSA carried out for the internal initiating events of the Loviisa 1 nuclear power station. Steam generator leakages and associated operator actions are major contributors to the current core-damage frequency estimate of 2 × 10-4/yr. The results are used to improve the plant and procedures and to guide future improvements.