FIREDATA, Nuclear Power Plant Fire Event Data Base

1 - Description of program or function: FIREDATA contains raw fire event data from 1965 through June 1985. These data were obtained from a number of reference sources including the American Nuclear Insurers, Licensee Event Reports, Nuclear Power Experience, Electric Power Research Institute Fire Loss Data and then collated into one database developed in the personal computer database management system, dBASE III. FIREDATA is menu-driven and asks interactive questions of the user that allow searching of the database for various aspects of a fire such as: location, mode of plant operation at the time of the fire, means of detection and suppression, dollar loss, etc. Other features include the capability of searching for single or multiple criteria (using Boolean 'and' or 'or' logical operations), user-defined keyword searches of fire event descriptions, summary displays of fire event data by plant name of calendar date, and options for calculating the years of operating experience for all commercial nuclear power plants from any user-specified date and the ability to display general plant information. 2 - Method of solution: The six database files used to store nuclear power plant fire event information, FIRE, DESC, SUM, OPEXPER, OPEXBWR, and EXPERPWR, are accessed by software to display information meeting user-specified criteria or to perform numerical calculations (e.g., to determine the operating experience of a nuclear plant). FIRE contains specific searchable data relating to each of 354 fire events. A keyword concept is used to search each of the 31 separate entries or fields. DESC contains written descriptions of each of the fire events. SUM holds basic plant information for all plants proposed, under construction, in operation, or decommissioned. This includes the initial criticality and commercial operation dates, the physical location of the plant, and its operating capacity. OPEXPER contains date information and data on how various plant locations are shared among units at each of 83 sites. It is used to calculate the operating experience for all three reactor types; BWR, PWR, and HTGR, and for five locations in the plants. OPEXBWR and EXPERPWR are subsets of the OPEXPER file holding information only for BWRs and PWRs, respectively. 3 - Restrictions on the complexity of the problem: FIREDATA will not work with dBASE II