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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.
Abdellatif M. Yacout, Stefano Salvatores, Yuri Orechwa
Nuclear Technology | Volume 113 | Number 2 | February 1996 | Pages 177-189
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35187
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Failure times of components are traditionally used to evaluate their reliability. An alternate approach is to analyze the degradation data accumulated during the component’s testing or during its normal operation. Degradation analysis is particularly useful when it is not possible to observe a significant number of failures. This is the case for metallic Integral Fast Reactor fuel pins irradiated in Experimental Breeder Reactor II, where failures have not taken place under normal operating conditions. A degradation analysis methodology is presented and applied to these pins. The time-to-failure distribution for the fuel pins is estimated based on a fixed threshold failure model. The confidence intervals of the distribution are calculated using a parametric bootstrap method.