Back to home
 
Review of Korean activities on PSA and its application for NPP
 
KANGHyun Gook1, and KIM Bo Gyung
 
1、Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering, KAIST, Daejeon, Korea (hyungook@kaist.ac.kr)

Abstract: This article provides an overview of Korean activities for utilization of probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) for various nuclear field applications. Korea is one of the most active countries which utilize the risk information for balancing safety and economy. In 1994, the policy statement on the nuclear safety was promulgated, requiring that the utility should perform integrated safety assessments for NPPs using the PSA and that the regulator should implement a risk-informed and reasonable regulation considering the cost benefit. Typically Risk Monitoring System (RIMS) was deployed in nuclear power plants (NPP) in 2007. Outage Risk Indicator of NPPs (ORION) and Plant Reliability data Information System (PRinS) were also implemented in NPPs. Risk information plays very important role in improvement of plant designs and operation procedure development. In addition to the utilization of PSA for the a construction permit and an operating license, many risk-informed applications including surveillance test intervals extension and allowed outage time extension were performed. The periodic risk quantification of a NPP is currently required by the regulatory agency during its periodic safety review (PSR), which assesses the cumulative effect of plant aging, modifications, operating experience, technical developments, and site characteristics. The active utilization of risk information implies that a PSA, which is critical to support decision making at NPPs, must have a credible and defensible basis. Thus, a concept of ‘living PSA’ which means continuous efforts to update or modify the risk models and data when it is necessary would be critical to keep the credible basis.
Keyword: living PSA; periodic safety review; PSA modeling methodology; risk-informed regulation and applications 
 
      Click here for viewing full text.