Report of the technical committee meeting on 1996 annual workshop on ASSET experience

The 1996 ASSET workshop was attended by 27 participants representing 18 countries. This level of support demonstrates the continued interest in the ASSET methodology and in particular the benefit of an International perspective in the analysis of the events at Nuclear Power Plants. Agenda of the meeting and list of participants are included in this report as Attachments 1 and 5 respectively. Papers and/or presentations were made by all countries represented and provided a wide range of views on the use of the ASSET methodology. In general the views of the delegates were positive but inevitably some were critical. The areas of criticism included the perennial problem with the use of the INES ranking procedures to assess event consequences, a perception by some delegates that ASSET is difficult to use and manpower intensive and that the programme for the Peer Review missions is very tight. With the exception of the INES use, the other criticisms were addressed within the working parties that form part of this workshop. The workshop was divided into three task groups to analyse missions at three NPPs, Forsmark, Sweden, Leningrad, Russia and Smolensk, Russia. Although the value of the last mentioned report was limited to the plant's self assessment as the ASSET peer review mission was postponed to later in 1996. Refs, figs, tabs