On the failure probability of the containment under accidental aircraft impact

Abstract Reliability concepts are applied to the containment of nuclear power plants (NPP) under accidental aircraft impact. The statistical properties of the various input variables effecting the loading condition such as mass, stiffness, impact velocity, etc. are discussed. The loading time history is modeled by a nonstationary random process. As aircraft engines detach immediately after impact, the analysis of the hard engine and the soft fuselage impact has to be carried out separately. The present analysis shows that the failure probability of the containment due to fuselage impact is negligibly small, i.e. −8 .