A feasibility study of a PSA application for accident management

Since the TMI accident, the importance of accident management in nuclear power plants has increased. Many countries, including the United States (US), have focused on understanding severe accidents, in order to identify ways to further improve the safety of the plants. It has been recognized that plant-specific probabilistic safety assessments (PSA) would be beneficial in understanding plant-specific vulnerabilities in severe accidents. The objectives of this paper are to describe the back-end analyses of nuclear power plants, to identify plant response and vulnerabilities via analyzing the quantified results, and to set up a framework for accident management program based on those back-end analysis results. Basically the scope and methodology of the analysis used to perform individual plant examination (IPE) are similar to those of PSA. Therefore, a state-of-the-art PSA technique has been used in this study to demonstrate its application feasibility for accident management. (author)