Risk-Informed/Performance-Based Fire Protection for Nuclear Power Plants

摘要

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) revised the fire protection requirements for commercial nuclear power plants to allow them to voluntarily change their fire protection licensing basis, permitting their use of risk-informed/performance-based evaluations for program changes without NRC pre-approval [Refs. 1-2]. The existing deterministic fire protection requirements [Ref. 3] established engineering margin through post-fire survival of safety systems capable of safe reactor shutdown. These requirements were developed before the staff and industry had the benefit of Probabilistic Risk Assessments (PRAs) and performance-based methods such as fire modeling.