Assessing the Impact of Common Cause Failures on Site Risk within Level 1 Multi-Unit PSA

Abstract

Common cause failures (CCFs) may lead to the simultaneous unavailability or failure of numerous components in the nuclear power plant because of the existence of a shared cause when an initiating event disrupts the normal functioning of nuclear power plants. The presence of common cause failures (intra-unit and inter-unit) can be recognized in a multi-unit probabilistic safety assessment (MUPSA) as a crucial dependency factor that can influence accident scenarios and the core damage frequency (CDF), as CCF may affect the availability and proper operation of mitigating systems. Since such failures are likely to significantly undermine the benefits of the concept of redundancy in nuclear power plant systems, it is necessary to identify the CCFs that contribute to the core damage in a multi-unit site and analyse their overall quantitative magnitude and qualitative proportions. In this study, a twin-unit generic pressurized water reactor (PWR) nuclear plant is modeled using the AIMS-PSA software. For the loss-of-offsite-power (LOOP) and station blackout (SBO) events, the site CDF was calculated, and the cut-sets produced by this quantification were examined for the modeled CCF basic events in the fault trees. The quantitative and qualitative contributions of the CCFs to the frequency of site core damage were examined. CCFs in the modeled fault trees contributed to 4.58% to the site CDF of the combined LOOP followed by SBO event. In the LOOP event alone that leads to core damage, the CCF contributed 4.58% to the site CDF while CCFs contributed 17.19% to the site CDF in the SBO event alone that leads to core damage. With CCF events considered in the modeling process, the site CDF estimated with CCF events increased by 7.53% in the combined LOOP followed by SBO event. In the LOOP event alone that leads to core damage, inclusion of CCF events in the modeling increased the site CDF by 7.42%. A 15.66% increase in site CDF was recorded in the SBO event alone that leads to core damage as compared to modeling without CCF events. The results show how crucial the common cause failure contribution is to site CDF. The safety of the nuclear plant at a site is impacted by an increase in site CDF when common cause failures are considered. The various CCF fundamental event compositions and their percentage contributions were explicitly examined by the minimal cut-sets which leads to core damage in the units. In conclusion, this study’s findings can help us better understand how CCFs increase multi-unit site risk and can also act as a starting point for future studies on the qualitative and quantitative categorizations of CCF effects within MUPSA.