A systematic procedure for the incorporation of common cause events into risk and reliability models

Abstract

Common cause events are an important class of dependent events with respect to their contribution to system unavailability and to plant risk. Unfortunately, these events have not been treated with any kind of consistency in applied risk studies over the past decade. Many probabilistic risk assessments (PRA) have not included these events at all, and those that have did not employ the kind of systematic procedures that are needed to achieve consistency, accuracy, and credibility in this area of PRA methodology. In this paper, the authors report on the progress recently made in the development of a systematic approach for incorporating common cause events into applied risk and reliability evaluations. This approach takes advantage of experience from recently completed PRAs and is the result of a project, sponsored by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), in which procedures for dependent events analysis are being developed. Described in this paper is a general framework for system-level common cause failure (CCF) analysis and its application to a three-train auxiliary feedwater system. Within this general framework, three parametric CCF models are compared, including the basic parameter (BP), multiple Greek letter (MGL), and binominal failure rate (BFR) models. Pitfalls of not following the recommended procedure are discussed, and some old issues, such as the benefits of redundancy and diversity, are reexamined.