Assessment of fire vulnerability for nuclear power plant safety systems by combining fault-and success-oriented logic with physical models

Abstract

The time behaviour of potential accident sequences may carry important information regarding nuclear power plant (NPP) safety operation and shutdown. In the case of external and environmental events, the ability of NPP components to operate correctly can be changed dramatically in a short time. In contrast to the failures caused by internal events, these two groups of undesirable events may lead to dynamic dependent failures among components of one or several systems. Such kinds of failure should be taken into account in the models of NPP behaviour. To evaluate how successfully the tasks of the safety systems will be carded out, logical models such as fault trees are usually used. The fault trees are not efficient at describing the short-term changes of the failure probabilities for system components. A method that has some advantages over the pure fault tree logic is proposed. The main features of the method are demonstrated by using examples.