Books in the Modern Nuclear Energy Analysis Methods series

This book captures the principles of safety evaluation as practiced in the regulated light-water reactor nuclear industry, as established and stabilized over the last 30 years. It is expected to serve both the current industry and those planning for the future. The work's coverage of the subject matter is the broadest to date, including not only the common topics of modeling and simulation, but also methods supporting the basis for the underlying assumptions, the extension to radiological safety, what to expect in a licensing review, historical perspectives and the implication for new designs.This text is an essential resource for practitioners and students, on the current best-practices in nuclear power plant safety and their basis. Contributors of this work are subject matter experts in their specialties, much of which was nurtured and inspired by Prof. Larry Hochreiter, a prominent nuclear safety pioneer.

Over the past 30 years, numerous concerns have been raised in the literature regarding the capability of static modeling approaches such as the event-tree (ET)/fault-tree (FT) methodology to adequately account for the impact of process/hardware/software/firmware/human interactions on nuclear power plant safety assessment, and methodologies to augment the ET/FT approach have been proposed. Often referred to as dynamic probabilistic risk/safety assessment (DPRA/DPSA) methodologies, which use a time-dependent phenomenological model of system evolution along with a model of its stochastic behavior to model for possible dependencies among failure events. The book contains a collection of papers that describe at existing plant level applicable DPRA/DPSA tools, as well as techniques that can be used to augment the ET/FT approach when needed.