Reliability Analysis for Passive Containment Cooling System in Seismic Hazard

Abstract

Passive containment cooling system is an important safety-related system in AP1000 nuclear power plant, by which heat produced in reactor is transferred to the heat sink–atmosphere based on natural circulation. So it is important to the plant safety whether the system can work well or not in the seismic hazard. Since the system operation is independent of human interfere or the operation of outside equipments, the reliability of the system is improved, however, physical process failure become one of the important contributors to the system operation failure because natural circulation may not keep when the system configuration is different from the design. So it is necessary to analyze the system reliability in seismic situation. The equipment failure probability under earthquake is a function of the peak ground acceleration which is stochastic, and the fault tree method used in traditional probability safety assessment (PSA) for system reliability analysis is not power enough to deal with conditional probability. In this paper, a new analysis method for system reliability evaluate at seismic situation based on Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is put forward, and annual failure probability of passive containment cooling system in AP1000 in seismic hazard is calculated, the result is according with the AP1000 seismic margin evaluation.