A New Dynamic Reliability Assessment for Mid-loop Operations in a Nuclear Power Plant

This paper presents a dynamic reliability assessment methodology for use in the safety assessment of a complex system such as a nuclear power plant. The method is applied to a dynamic analysis of the potential accident sequences that may occur during mid-loop operation in a nuclear power plant. The idea behind this approach consists of both the use of the concept of the performance achievement/requirement correlation and of a dynamic event tree generation method. The assessment of the system reliability depends on the determination of both the required performance distribution and the achieved performance distribution. The quantified correlation between requirement and achievement represents a comparison between two competing variables. It is demonstrated that this method is easily applicable and flexible in that it can be applied to any kind of dynamic reliability problem.