A quantification methodology of Seismic Probabilistic Safety Assessment for nuclear power plant

Abstract

A Seismic Probabilistic Safety Assessment (SPSA), unlike other internal or external event analyses, has a very high probability of basic events when a strong earthquake occurs. Because of this high probability, the Core Damage Frequency (CDF) might be overestimated by the Rare Events Approximation (REA) and Minimal Cutset Upper Bound (MCUB) method for general quantitative analysis. To compensate for this overestimation, the exact CDF value can be derived with post-processing software such as an Advanced Cutset Upper Bound Estimator (ACUBE) or Fault Tree Evaluation using Monte Carlo simulation (FTeMC). However, the Minimal Cut Sets (MCSs), which has the same result as the calculated CDF, cannot be derived with both methods. In this paper, we propose a Monte Carlo Simulation Allocation Method (MCSAM) to derive the exact CDF and MCSs. We expect that the MCSAM will easily identify the plant's vulnerabilities to review the exact MCSs consistent with CDF results without additional post-processing or Monte Carlo Simulation.