Application of the proposed safety goals framework to the German regulatory framework for nuclear power plants. Annex II

In the past, the safety concept of nuclear power plants as well as licensing and supervising decisions by the competent authorities and their experts in the Federal Republic of Germany were mainly based on deterministic principles. Safety-related decision-making during design and licensing has essentially been based on the verification of compliance with the German regulations pre-describing technical requirements as laid down, e.g., in the German nuclear safety standards. A probabilistic safety assessment has been essentially performed in the framework of the periodic safety reviews as a supplement to the deterministic safety analysis. Currently, no specific probabilistic quantitative safety goals for nuclear power plants or other nuclear facilities and no site-wide safety goals are determined within the German regulatory framework. However, a recent document requires that modifications of measures, equipment or the operating mode of a nuclear power plant, compared with the unchanged condition of this plant, must not lead to an increase in the average core damage frequency and the average frequency of large and early releases, neither for full power operation nor for low-power and shutdown states, considering all plant-internal events as well as all internal and external hazards as well as very rare man-made external hazards.