Survey of PWR plant personnel on shutdown safety practices and risk management needs. EPRI Outage Risk Assessment and Management (ORAM) program. Final report, March 1992

Nuclear power plant operating experience has shown that PWRs are susceptible to a variety of events during shutdown conditions. At the request of its member utilities, EPRI initiated a program to develop an integrated technical assistance package for evaluating and managing risk during shutdown operation. This program is called the Outage Risk Assessment and Management (ORAM) Program. One of the tasks of the program was to survey EPRI member utilities to gain insights into existing outage management practices. In June of 1991 a questionnaire was developed and sent to the EPRI member utilities that operate pressurized water reactors to solicit information concerning current outage management practices. The questionnaire covered four main topics 1) general outage management; 2) refueling; 3) risk quantification and 4) operating staff insights. The information obtained from the survey and insights acquired from site interviews were used as input in making generic probabilistic assessments and in developing risk management guidelines. The report contains a summary of the survey responses. (author)