Best Safety Engineering Practices for Nuclear Safety
With better method integration and Safety Engineering practices European nuclear projects can respond to stringent safety requirements on external hazards without timetable and cost overruns.
Nuclear power has a significant role in turning Europe into a climate-neutral economy by 2050. In order to fully benefit from nuclear power, the design and construction timetable and costs have to be predictable and better controlled without compromising the safety of nuclear power plants.
The stress test recommendations have led to stringent safety requirements in many EU member countries in order to avoid consequences leading to severe accidents similar to Fukushima nuclear accident. The tightened safety requirements have been one reason for the prolonged licensing period of nuclear power plant new builds and upgrades.
The nuclear industry has extensive safety analysis methods to take care of the tightened safety requirements. The main problem has been the integration of safety analysis methods with requirement management and plant design processes. The integration of methods and processes is typically handled in the Safety Engineering practices.
To accelerate the implementation of best Safety Engineering practices a Benchmark Exercise on Safety Engineering Practices (BESEP) is conducted between several EU countries. This will help to find the most efficient Safety Engineering practices to support the safety margins determination and the verification of stringent safety requirements against external hazards.
As a result, the Benchmark Exercise will give guidance on how to improve the flow of information between different safety analysis methods and how to create a graded approach for the deployment of more sophisticated safety analysis methods. By using the results of probabilistic safety assessments, the graded approach aims to maintain a balance between the plant level risk originating from different external hazards and the resources and level of detail allocated for the analysis of different external hazards.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020
research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 945138.