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North American construction is back—smaller and faster—at OPG’s Darlington
“The nuclear renaissance is real here,” said Ontario Power Generation’s Subo Sinnathamby on May 8, one year to the day after OPG secured a final investment decision to build the first of four planned BWRX-300 reactors at its Darlington nuclear power plant, and shortly after the new reactor’s foundation was lifted into place. “We got our license to construct in April and our [final investment decision] in May, and we’ve been off to the races since.”
Tatsuya Sakurahara, Zahra Mohaghegh, Seyed Reihani, Ernie Kee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 204 | Number 3 | December 2018 | Pages 354-377
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1486159
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nearly half of the U.S. nuclear power plants (NPPs) are in the process of transitioning, or have already transitioned, to a risk-informed, performance-based fire protection program. For this transition, Fire Probabilistic Risk Assessment (Fire PRA) is used as a foundation for fire risk evaluation. To increase realism in Fire PRA by reducing conservative bias, the authors have developed an Integrated Probabilistic Risk Assessment (I-PRA) methodological framework that does not require major changes to the existing plant Probabilistic Risk Assessments (PRAs). The underlying failure mechanism models associated with fire events are developed in a separate module, which can be interfaced and connected to the existing plant PRA. This paper explains the areas of methodological advancements in I-PRA, comparing them with the existing Fire PRA of NPPs. This comparison is further demonstrated in a realistic case study that applies the I-PRA framework to a critical fire-induced scenario at an NPP. The core damage frequency (CDF) for the selected scenario, computed by the I-PRA framework, is compared with the results of the Full Compartment Burn screening method and the existing Fire PRA methodology. Using the I-PRA framework, the CDF for the selected scenario has decreased by a factor of 20 compared with the Full Compartment Burn screening approach and by a factor of 2 compared to the existing Fire PRA methodology based on NUREG/CR-6850 and the subsequent NUREGs that have updated the data and methods for individual steps.