We estimate the effect of local monitoring and information disclosure on safety and compliance with self-reporting standards in the French nuclear sector. We use a novel dataset on deviations from safety, radiological and environmental standards recorded in the French nuclear fleet since 1978....

Seismic probabilistic safety assessment (SPSA) is a systematic method for examining and evaluating the risk from earthquake-initiated accidents. The significant advances in the area of SPSA since the initial publication in 2002 of Technical Opinion Paper No. 2: Seismic Probabilistic Safety...

Following the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, many countries began funding research and development on nuclear fuel designs with enhanced accident tolerance (ATFs). ATFs have improved designs, materials and performance features compared with those of the current generation...

Climate change will create specific risks and challenges for nuclear power plants and the electricity system as a whole. Extreme weather events caused by climate change – such as floods, storms, heat waves and droughts – have already affected the operation of nuclear power plants. Any...

CSNI Technical Opinion Paper No. 17: Fire Probabilistic Safety Assessments for Nuclear Power Plants: 2019 Update provides an authoritative review of the current status and use of the fire PSA in nuclear power plants. The report demonstrates that while fires at a particular plant site are highly...

On the basis of the unique experience of operating reactors with heavy liquid metal coolant–eutectic lead-bismuth alloy in nuclear submarines, the concept of modular small fast reactors SVBR-100 for civilian nuclear power has been developed and validated. The features of this innovative...

This report describes methods for prioritizing the risk importances of maintenances using a Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA). Approaches then are described for quantifying their reliability and risk effects. Two different PRA importance measures, minimal cutset importances and risk reduction...

Since the Reactor Safety Study in the early 1970's, human reliability analysis (HRA) has been evolving towards a better ability to account for the factors and conditions that can lead humans to take unsafe actions and thereby provide better estimates of the likelihood of human error for...

This paper complements other work which has evaluated the cost impacts of radiation standards on the nuclear industry. It focuses on the approaches to valuation of the health and safety benefits of radiation standards and the actual and appropriate processes of benefit-cost comparison. A brief...

This Department of Energy (DOE) technical standards list (TSL) has been prepared by the Office of Nuclear Safety Policy and Standards (EH-31) on the basis of currently available technical information. Periodic updates of this TSL will be issued as additional information is received on...

Graphical presentations of human actions in incident and accident sequences have been used for many years. However, for the most part, human decision making has been underrepresented in these trees. This paper presents a method of incorporating the human decision process into graphical...

This report introduces a new perspective on the basic concept of dependent failures where the definition of dependency is based on clustering in failure times of similar components. This perspective has two significant implications: first, it relaxes the conventional assumption that dependent...

This paper discusses uncertainty in the output calculation of a model due to uncertainty in inputs values. Uncertainty in input values, characterized by suitable probability distributions, propagates through the model to a probability distribution of an output. Our objective in studying...

Detailreich-kritische Geschichte der Nutzung der Kernenergie in Deutschland, beginnend mit der naiven Euphorie der 1950er-Jahre über die Protestbewegungen bis hin zum durch Tschernobyl und Fukushima mitverursachtem Niedergang. (Rolf Raschka)

Meeting the growing demand for energy, and electricity in particular, while addressing the need to curb greenhouse gas emissions and to ensure security of energy supply, is one of the most difficult challenges facing the world’s economies. No single technology can respond to this challenge,...

Nuclear power is confronted with a number of challenges in the near term. One major constraint is the economics of nuclear power, driven by both the high capital costs and financial uncertainties. The second is concern about catastrophic accidents; despite the development of newer reactor...

The Fukushima nuclear accident on March 11, 2011 in Japan has severely dented the prospects of growth of civilian nuclear power in many countries. Although Japan's worst nuclear accident was triggered by an unprecedented earthquake and tsunami, inadequate safety countermeasures and collusive...

Most of the current nuclear fuel safety criteria were established during the 1960s and early 1970s. Although these criteria were validated against experiments with fuel designs available at that time, a number of tests were based on unirradiated fuels. Additional verification was performed as...