Risk-Based Allowed Outage Time and Surveillance Test Interval Extensions for Angra 1

Abstract EN

In this work, Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) is used to evaluate Allowed Outage Times (AOT) and Surveillance Test Intervals (STI) extensions for three Angra 1 nuclear power plant safety systems.

The interest in such an analysis lies on the fact that PSA comprises a risk-based tool for safety evaluation and has been increasingly applied to support both the regulatory and the operational decision-making processes.

Regarding Angra 1, among other applications, PSA is meant to be an additional method that can be used by the utility to justify Technical Specification relaxation to the Brazilian regulatory body.

The risk measure used in this work is the Core Damage Frequency, obtained from the Angra 1 Level 1 PSA study.

AOT and STI extensions are evaluated for the Safety Injection, Service Water and Auxiliary Feedwater Systems using the SAPHIRE code.

In order to compensate for the risk increase caused by the extensions, compensatory measures as (1) test of redundant train prior to entering maintenance and (2) staggered test strategy are proposed.

Results have shown that the proposed AOT extensions are acceptable for two of the systems with the implementation of compensatory measures whereas STI extensions are acceptable for all three systems.