• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.157-163
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• 2018

This paper describes design improvement to a research rector for safety enhancement using Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA). This PSA under reactor design was undertaken to assess the level of safety for the design of a research reactor and to evaluate whether it is probabilistically safe to operate and reliable to use. The scope of the PSA reported here is a Level 1 PSA, which addresses the risks associated with the core damage. The technical objectives of this study were to identify accident sequences leading to core damage and to derive design improvement from the dominant accident sequences through the sensitivity analysis. The AIMS-PSA and FTREX were used for the this PSA of the research reactor. The criterion for inclusion was all sequences with a point estimate frequency greater than a truncation value of 1.0E-14/yr. The final result indicates a point estimate of 6.79E-05/yr for the overall Core Damage Frequency (CDF) attributable to internal initiating events for the research reactor under design. Based on the dominant accident sequences from the PSA, the seven kinds of sensitivity analysis were performed and some design improvement items were derived. When the five methods to improve the safety were all applied to the reactor design and emergency operating procedure, its risk was reduced to about 1.21E-06/yr from 6.79E-05/yr. The contribution of LOCA and LOEP with high CDF were significantly reduced by the sensitivity analysis. The safety of the research reactor was well improved and the risk was reduced than before adapting the design improvement gotten from the sensitivity analysis. The present study indicated that the research reactor has the well-balanced safety in regard to each initiating event contribution to CDF. The PSA methodology is very effective to improve reactor safety in a conceptual design phase and especially, Risk-informed design(RID) is very nice way to find the deficiencies of research reactor under design and to improve the reactor safety by solving them.

• Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• v.57 no.2
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• pp.80-87
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• 2020

As the Arctic sea ice decreases due to various reasons such as global warming, the demand for ships and offshore structures operating in the Arctic region is steadily increasing. In the case of sea ice, the anisotropy is caused by the uncertainty inside the material. For most of the research, nevertheless, estimating the ice load has been treated deterministically. With regard to this, in this paper, a four-point bending strength analysis of an ice specimen was attempted using a stochastic finite element method. First, spatial distribution of the material properties used in the yield criterion was assumed to be a multivariate Gaussian random field. After that, a direct method, which is a sort of stochastic finite element method, and a sensitivity method using the sensitivity of response for random variables were proposed for calculating the probabilistic distribution of ice specimen strength. A parametric study was conducted with different mean vectors and correlation lengths for each material property used in the above procedure. The calculation time was about ten seconds for the direct method and about three minutes for the sensitivity methods. As the cohesion and correlation length increased, the mean value of the critical load and the standard deviation increased. On the contrary, they decreased as the friction angle increased. Also, in all cases, the direct and sensitivity methods yielded very similar results.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.16 no.10
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• pp.1229-1238
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• 2002

In this paper, a method to obtain the sensitivity of eigenvalues and the random responses of the structure with uncertain parameters is proposed. The concept of the proposed method is that the perturbed equation of each uncertain substructure is obtained using the finite element method, and the perturbed equation of the overall structure is obtained using the mode synthesis method. By this way, the reduced order perturbed equation of the uncertain system can be obtained. And the response of the uncertain system is obtained using probability method. As a numerical example, a simple piping system is considered as an example structure. The damping and spring constants of the support are considered as the uncertain parameters. Then the variations of the eigenvalues, the correlation function and the power spectral density function of the responses are calculated. As a result, the proposed method is considered to be useful technique to analyze the sensitivities of eigenvalues and random response against random excitation in terms of the accuracy and the calculation time.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.249-265
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• 1987

For the probabilistic risk assessment of the high level radioactive waste repository, some methods have been proposed up to now. Since the system has highly uncertain input parameters, the evaluated risk for some input parameter values has high uncertainty. In this paper, methods of uncertainty and sensitivity analysis are devised to analyse systematically these factors and applied to a probabilistic risk assessment model of the high level waste repository, The statistical package SPUSA developed through this study can be used for any other fields, e.g., statistical thermal margin analysis, source term uncertainty analysis, etc.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.4
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• pp.764-775
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• 2020

Periodic safety reviews (PSRs) are conducted on operating nuclear power plants (NPPs) and have been mandated also for research reactors in Korea, in response to the Fukushima accident. One safety review tool, the probabilistic safety assessment (PSA), aims to identify weaknesses in the design and operation of the research reactor, and to evaluate and compare possible safety improvements. However, the PSA for research reactors is difficult due to scarce data availability. An important element in the analysis of research reactors is the reactor protection system (RPS), with its functionality and importance. In this view, we consider that of the AGN-201K, a zero-power reactor without forced decay heat removal systems, to demonstrate a risk-informed safety improvement study. By incorporating risk- and safety-significance importance measures, and sensitivity and uncertainty analyses, the proposed method identifies critical components in the RPS reliability model, systematically proposes potential safety improvements and ranks them to assist in the decision-making process.

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.7-14
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• 2010

Ecological Risk Assessment (ERA) supports a decision-making process such as establishment of environmental quality criteria. Soil quality criteria (SQC) are essential to protect soil organisms from the exposure to various soil contaminants. In this study, ERA methodologies of advanced countries for soil pollution were extensively compared to propose the ERA approach suitable for soil ecosystem in Korea. The soil ERAs in European Chemical Bureau(ECB), The Netherlands, and Canada can be classified as deterministic ecological risk assessment (DERA), and probabilistic ecological risk assessment (PERA) based on species sensitivity distribution (SSD). We propose three ERA methods according to abundance and reliability of soil ecotoxicity data. The method considered land use such as residential/agricultural, and industrial/commercial uses. The taxonomic groups of soil organism were classified as 'Class' level including different trophic levels (Magnoliopsida or Liliopsida, Clitellata, and Insecta or Secernentea). This study can be used to estimate the soil quality criteria to protect soil biota.

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.33-48
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• 2017

An optimum disposal plan of disused sealed radioactive sources (DSRSs) should be established to ensure long-term disposal safety at the low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste (LILW) disposal facility in Gyeongju. In this study, an optimum disposal system was suggested and preliminary post-closure safety assessment was performed. The DSRSs disposal system was composed of a rock cavern and near surface disposal facilities at the Gyeongju LILW disposal facility. The assessment was conducted using GoldSim program, and probabilistic assessment and sensitivity analysis were implemented to evaluate the uncertainties in the input parameters of natural barriers. Deterministic and probabilistic calculations indicated that the maximum dose was below the regulatory limits ($0.1mSvyr^{-1}$ for the normal scenario, $1mSvyr^{-1}$ for the well scenario). It was concluded that the DSRSs disposal system would maintain environmental safety over a long-time. Moreover, the partition coefficient of Np in host rock, Darcy velocity in host rock, and density of the host rock were the most sensitive parameters in predicting exposure dose in the safety assessment.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.43-53
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• 2022

This paper describes an attempt to improve and optimize the operational safety level of a domestic research reactor by conducting a probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) under full-power operating conditions. The PSA was undertaken to assess the level of safety at an operating research reactor in Korea, to evaluate whether it is probabilistically safe and reliable to operate, and to obtain insights regarding the requisite procedural and design improvements for achieving safer operation. The technical objectives were to use the PSA to identify the accident sequences leading to core damage, and to conduct sensitivity analyses based thereon to derive insights regarding potential design and procedural improvements. Based on the dominant accident sequences identified by the PSA, eight types of sensitivity analysis were performed, and relevant insights for achieving safer operation were derived. When these insights were applied to the reactor design and operating procedure, the risk was found to be reduced by approximately ten times, and the safety was significantly improved. The results demonstrate that the PSA methodology is very effective for improving reactor safety in the full-power operating phase. In particular, it is a highly suitable approach for identifying the deficiencies of a reactor operating at full power, and for improving the reactor safety by overcoming those deficiencies.

• Coupled systems mechanics
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.429-444
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• 2023

The comprehension and structural modeling of masonry constructions is fundamental to safeguard the integrity of built cultural assets and intervene through adequate actions, especially in earthquake-prone regions. Despite the availability of several modeling strategies and modern computing power, modeling masonry remains a great challenge because of still demanding computational efforts, constraints in performing destructive or semi-destructive in-situ tests, and material uncertainties. This paper investigates the shear behavior of masonry walls by applying a plane-stress FE continuum model with the Modified Masonry-like Material (MMLM). Epistemic uncertainty affecting input parameters of the MMLM is considered in a probabilistic framework. After appointing a suitable probability density function to input quantities according to prior engineering knowledge, uncertainties are propagated to outputs relying on gPCE-based surrogate models to considerably speed up the forward problem-solving. The sensitivity of the response to input parameters is evaluated through the computation of Sobol' indices pointing out the parameters more worthy to be further investigated, when dealing with the seismic assessment of masonry buildings. Finally, masonry mechanical properties are calibrated in a probabilistic setting with the Bayesian approach to the inverse problem based on the available measurements obtained from the experimental load-displacement curves provided by shear compression in-situ tests.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.265-271
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• 2015

The tsunami hazard analysis is performed for testing the application of probabilistic tsunami hazard analysis to nuclear power plant sites in the Korean Peninsula. Tsunami hazard analysis is based on the seismic hazard analysis. Probabilistic method is adopted for considering the uncertainties caused by insufficient information of tsunamigenic fault sources. Logic tree approach is used. Uljin nuclear power plant (NPP) site is selected for this study. The tsunamigenic fault sources in the western part of Japan (East Sea) are used for this study because those are well known fault sources in the East Sea and had several records of tsunami hazards. We have performed numerical simulations of tsunami propagation for those fault sources in the previous study. Therefore we use the wave parameters obtained from the previous study. We follow the method of probabilistic tsunami hazard analysis (PTHA) suggested by the atomic energy society of Japan (AESJ). Annual exceedance probabilities for wave height level are calculated for the site by using the information about the recurrence interval, the magnitude range, the wave parameters, the truncation of lognormal distribution of wave height, and the deviation based on the difference between simulation and record. Effects of each parameters on tsunami hazard are tested by the sensitivity analysis, which shows that the recurrence interval and the deviation dominantly affects the annual exceedance probability and the wave heigh level, respectively.