Application of Risk-Informed Approaches in Significance Determination of Armenian NPP Inspection Findings

Abstract

Risk-informed decision-making approaches in the field of regulatory inspections performed at the NPPs aim at supporting the regulatory body in better organization of inspections. The paper describes the Armenian national experience of inspection activities by focusing on the process of significance assessment of inspection findings and demonstrates its applicability on practical examples. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed process, various hypothetic inspection findings are defined for further assessment. Approaches are proposed for the significance determination of single and multiple findings. Several cases of single hypothetic findings and their combinations are considered. The paper summarizes the results for the considered cases, which reveal the applicability of the process by demonstrating the significance of hypothetic findings and the cumulative effects of multiple simultaneous hypothetic findings on plant safety.