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Swiss nuclear power and the case for long-term operation
Designed for 40 years but built to last far longer, Switzerland’s nuclear power plants have all entered long-term operation. Yet age alone says little about safety or performance. Through continuous upgrades, strict regulatory oversight, and extensive aging management, the country’s reactors are being prepared for decades of continued operation, in line with international practice.
G. Apostolakis, T. L. Chu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 50 | Number 1 | August 1980 | Pages 5-15
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT80-A17065
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The reliability analysis of the engineered safety systems of nuclear power plants requires the calculation of the pointwise and average unavailabilities of redundant systems under periodic test and maintenance. The complexity of the calculations usually requires simulation for realistic results. However, simple analytical expressions showing the significant contributions to the unavailability provide insights concerning the relative importance of the potential failure modes of the systems, such as hardware failures, demand-type failures, human errors, and various types of dependent (common cause) failures. These expressions can be used for a quick calculation of the unavailability as well as the propagation of uncertainties by analytical methods, e.g., the method of moments.