Comparison of Resilience vs Traditional Probabilistic Safety Assessment for Nuclear Power Facilities

Abstract

The safety of nuclear power facilities has consistently been of concern to the public as well as the scientific community due to the potentially catastrophic consequences of nuclear accidents. In this paper, a Petri net modelling-based resilience methodology developed by the authors is compared with the traditional Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) methodologies namely Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) and Event Tree Analysis (ETA) used for nuclear engineering risk assessment. A station blackout (SBO) accident is used as a case study to facilitate the comparison. The advantages and drawbacks of the two methods are compared and conclusions are drawn as to the best of these two options for future exploitation in ensuring the safety of nuclear reactors.