Development of logical structure for multi-unit probabilistic safety assessment

Abstract Site or multi-unit (MU) risk assessment has been a major issue in the field of nuclear safety study since the Fukushima accident in 2011. There have been few methods or experiences for MU risk assessment because the Fukushima accident was the first real MU accident and before the accident, there was little expectation of the possibility that an MU accident will occur. In addition to the lack of experience of MU risk assessment, since an MU nuclear power plant site is usually very complex to analyze as a whole, it was considered that a systematic method such as probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) is difficult to apply to MU risk assessment. This paper proposes a new MU risk assessment methodology by using the conventional PSA methodology which is widely used in nuclear power plant risk assessment. The logical failure structure of a site with multiple units is suggested from the definition of site risk, and a decomposition method is applied to identify specific MU failure scenarios.