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The human factor in licensing and operating the next generation of nuclear plants
As human factors specialists working at the intersection of human performance and nuclear operations, we are witnessing one of the nuclear sector’s most significant transitions in decades. The emergence of small modular reactors, microreactors, and other advanced designs is reshaping the industry’s landscape. Digital instrumentation and controls, passive safety systems, and increased automation are creating opportunities for greater safety margins and more flexible operation. These same features also fundamentally redefine what it means to “operate” a nuclear plant. Interactions among human roles, automation, and passive systems shape how people maintain awareness, exercise judgment, and intervene when necessary. These developments affect both operational realities and the regulatory foundations on which nuclear safety is built.
Rob D. Radulovich, William E. Vesely, Tunc Aldemir
Nuclear Technology | Volume 112 | Number 1 | October 1995 | Pages 21-41
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A15849
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the nuclear industry, aging effects have been traditionally incorporated into probabilistic risk assessment studies by using a constant (static) unavailability (qs) averaged over time. However, recent work shows that because of aging, substantial deviations may occur in time-dependent nuclear plant component unavailability from that predicted by static models well within the plant lifetime. A methodology based on the standard extension of the classic renewal equation when repair is explicitly considered is used to investigate (a) the trends in the effects of aging on time-dependent component unavailability as a function of changing first failure density (FFD) and test parameters and (b) the circumstances for which static approximations may be inadequate to describe these effects. The investigation uses several point- and time-averaged unavailability measures based on time-dependent unavailability, such as before-test unavailability (BTU), average-interval unavailability (AIU) and year-average unavailability (YAU), and is restricted to periodically tested components whose FFDs satisfy the Weibull distribution with aging threshold. The results show that while point measures (e.g., BTU) can substantially differ from static unavailability and while all measures are sensitive to changes in the Weibull shape parameter b, aging threshold time t, and time between tests T, the differences between the time-averaged measures used (e.g., AIU, YAU) and the static unavailability were only found to be relatively significant for one case among more than 100 combinations of b, T, and T that were investigated. The differences are a factor of <2 for all other cases, which is within the uncertainty margin on the data used in the study. The results also show that qs may be an adequate unavailability measure for low values of b (i.e., b<2) and high values of T (i.e., T> 18 months) and may describe the late effects of aging on component unavailability irrespective of band T (i.e., beyond 25 yr of component age for the data under consideration).
