Handbook of Parameter Estimation for Probabilistic Risk Assessment

Description

NUREG/CR-6823 SAND2003-3348PSandia National Laboratories U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research Washington, DC 20555-0001 2003Prepared by: C.L. Atwood JL. LaChance, H.F. Martz, D.L Anderson, M. Englehardte, D. Whitehead, T. WheelerProbabilistic risk assessment (PRA) is a mature technology that can provide a quantitative assessment of the risk from accidents in nuclear power plants. It involves the development of models that delineate the response of systems and operators to accident initiating events. Additional models are generated to identify the component failure modes required to cause the accident mitigating systems to fail. Each component failure mode is represented as an individual "basic event" in the systems models. Estimates of risk are obtained by propagating the uncertainty distributions for each of the parameters through the PRA models. The data analysis portion of a nuclear power plant PRA provides estimates of the parameters used to determine the frequencies and probabilities of the various events modeled in a PRA. This handbook provides guidance on sources of information and methods for estimating the parameters used in PRA models and for quantifying the uncertainties in the estimates. This includes determination of both plant-specific and generic estimates for initiating event frequencies, component failure rates and unavailabilities, and equipment non-recovery probabilities.