Health and safety impact of steam generator tube degradation

In this paper the author addresses the problems inherent in evaluating the safety of steam generators with respect to tube rupture as part of a probabilistic safety analysis (PSA) of a reactor plant. He reviews the history of PSA as applied to reactors, and then looks at tube rupture histories as a start toward establishing event frequencies. He considers tube ruptures from the aspect of being an initiating event to being a conditional event to some other event, and then the question of performance of the steam generator in the face of a severe accident in the reactor