Advances in multi-unit nuclear power plant probabilistic risk assessment

The Fukushima Dai-ichi accident highlighted the importance of risks from multiple nuclear reactor unit accidents at a site. As a result, there has been considerable interest in Multi-Unit Probabilistic Risk Assessment (MUPRA) in the past few years. For considerations in nuclear safety, the MUPRA estimates measures of risk and identifies contributors to risk representing the entire site rather than the individual units in the site. In doing so, possible unit-to-unit interactions and dependencies should be modeled and accounted for in the MUPRA. In order to effectively account for these risks, six main commonality classifications—initiating events, shared connections, identical components, proximity dependencies, human dependencies, and organizational dependencies—may be used. This paper examines advances in MUPRA, offers formal definitions of multi-unit site risk measures and proposes quantitative approaches and data to account for unit-to-unit dependencies. Finally, a parametric approach for the multi-unit dependencies has been discussed and a simple example illustrates application of the proposed methodology.