Thirty-three Years of Regulating Fire Protection at Commercial U.S. Nuclear Power Plants: Dousing the Flames of Controversy**

Gallucci, Raymond Hv

doi:10.1007/s10694-008-0052-x

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…The author himself must confess to being guilty of false optimism in December 2006 when writing "perhaps the single achievement most responsible for the improved regulatory environment for fire protection at commercial nuclear power plants has been the modification to 10CFR50.48 that allows licensees to 'maintain a fire protection program that complies with NFPA 805 as an alternative to complying with [past, purely deterministic regulations]'." [48] Now, in retrospect, he must conclude that, while NFPA 805 worked to make plants safer (or at least remain at their current level), nonetheless it was like removing tonsils through the rectum rather than the mouth. The end was the same (tonsils removed), but the means could be unnecessarily painful with a lot of collateral damage.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Risk-Deformed Regulation: What Went Wrong with NFPA 805

Gallucci¹

2018

Civ Eng J

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National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) Standard 805 was incorporated into Title 10 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations to allow commercial nuclear plants to transition their existing, deterministic fire protection licensing bases to ones that are “performance-based and risk-informed.” Both the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the commercial reactor industry championed this major leap forward in “risk-informed regulation.” However, hidden behind all the “success” are compromises and manipulations that were necessary to make this “work,” as revealed in this article. It is written by a former employee of the NRC (views do not nor ever did represent an official position), the first to receive a PhD on a thesis specifically related to fire probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) in nuclear plants, and later hired in 2003 as the expert in fire PRA for the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation (NRR). He participated in the NFPA-805 program from the start in 2005 until mid-2014. The perspectives here cover that time period, with some extended time specific to issues that the interested reader can find detailed in “Risk-Deformed Regulation: What Went Wrong with NFPA 805” http://vixra.org/pdf/ (access latest version of entry 1805.0403).NFPA 805 will have been “successful” in that adopting plants are as safe as or safer than before, at a minimum having at least become more knowledgeable of potential safety weaknesses. Plants that made effective changes will be safer than before, although “effective” conveys that some changes only may have “seemingly” reduced risk. If such changes were prompted by questionable risk-reduction credits such as those cited later in this paper, then perhaps actual risk-reduction changes that could have been made were not. At worst, the plant merely missed an opportunity to become “safer,” a consequence of the problems with “risk-deformed regulation.”

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Risk-Deformed Regulation: What Went Wrong with NFPA 805

Gallucci¹

2018

Civ Eng J

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“…Many experts pointed out that the main gap in fire PRA is the over estimation of risk due to the excessive conservatism that is introduced in the input parameters and modeling assumptions specifically for fire ignition frequency [25,26,27].…”

Section: Cdfmentioning

confidence: 99%

Candu Fire Probabilistic Risk Assessment (Pra) Model

Shalabi

Hadjisophocleous

2019

CNL Nuclear Review

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Fire Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) is being introduced to the fire protection engineering practice both locally and worldwide. The commercial nuclear power industry has also experiencing the impact of this new approach. This paper examines the work performed to assess the relative accuracy of fire models for CANDU nuclear power plant (NPP) applications. The Canadian NPP uses some portions of NUREG/CR-6850 in performing fire PRA. Canadian fire ignition frequencies have been provided by International Fire Data Exchange Project. The CANDU Fire PRA Model can quantitatively evaluate plant damage states and core damage frequencies. This model will assist fire engineers in performing CANDU Fire PRA analysis, by recognizing vulnerabilities related to fire events and will contribute to further improvement of the Canadian NPPs’ safety.

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“…After a major fire at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) [1], fire protection at NPPs emerged as a controversial and complicated area of nuclear safety [2,3]. Traditionally, deterministic and prescriptive requirements per 10 CFR 50.48 and the associated Appendix R [4] have been used to regulate fire protection at U.S. NPPs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human Reliability Analysis-Based Method for Manual Fire Suppression Analysis in an Integrated Probabilistic Risk Assessment

Sakurahara

Mohaghegh

Kee

2019

ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part B: Mechanical Engineering

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Fire is one of the most critical initiating events that can lead to core damage in nuclear power plants (NPPs). To evaluate the potential vulnerability of plants to fire hazards, fire probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) is commonly conducted. Manual fire protection features, performed by the first responders (e.g., fire brigade), play a key role in preventing and mitigating fire-induced damage to the plant systems. In the current fire PRA methodology of NPPs, there are two main gaps in the modeling of manual fire protection features: (i) the quantification of the first responder performance is solely based on empirical data (industry-wide historical fire events), and so the plant-specific design and conditions cannot be explicitly considered; and (ii) interactions of first responders with fire propagation are not fully captured. To address these challenges, the authors develop a model-based approach, grounded on human reliability analysis (HRA) and coupled with the fire dynamics simulator (FDS), to model the first responder performance more realistically and consider the interface between the first responder performance and fire propagation more explicitly. In this paper, the HRA-based approach is implemented in an integrated PRA (I-PRA) methodological framework for fire PRA and applied to a switchgear room fire scenario of an NPP. The proposed model-based approach (a) adds more realism to fire PRA and so to risk assessment in NPPs and (b) provides opportunities for sensitivity and importance measure analyses with respect to design conditions; therefore, contributes to risk management in NPPs.

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Thirty-three Years of Regulating Fire Protection at Commercial U.S. Nuclear Power Plants: Dousing the Flames of Controversy**

Cited by 8 publications

References 3 publications

Risk-Deformed Regulation: What Went Wrong with NFPA 805

Risk-Deformed Regulation: What Went Wrong with NFPA 805

Candu Fire Probabilistic Risk Assessment (Pra) Model

Human Reliability Analysis-Based Method for Manual Fire Suppression Analysis in an Integrated Probabilistic Risk Assessment

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