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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.
Michel Bloch, Daniel Dussarté, Jean-Louis Pierrey
Nuclear Technology | Volume 84 | Number 3 | March 1989 | Pages 282-284
Technical Paper | Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Risk Management / Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT89-A34211
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Premature aging of the heat exchange tubes in steam generators due to stress corrosion may be a common cause of nonsimultaneous multiple ruptures, enhancing the risk associated with that accidental situation. Classical methods for probabilistic evaluation are not easily applicable to this type of problem. The component lifetime can be used directly as a primary random variable with a distribution width (mean value irrelevant) deduced from operational data or engineering judgment. The conditional probability to get one or more ruptures before a critical time following the occurrence of the first rupture can be obtained from the probability laws for the time intervals between the first and successive ruptures and can be used in accident sequence analyses. As an example, the conditional probability of the second rupture is approximately proportional to the critical time and is ∼10−4 for a lifetime distribution standard deviation of 15 000 h and a critical time of 1 h.