Probabilistic Risk Assessment Based Guidance for Piping In-Service Inspection

Abstract

Some of the goals of the Nondestructive Evaluation Reliability Program sponsored by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission at Pacific Northwest Laboratory are to assess current inspection requirements for all pressure boundary systems and components, to determine whether improvements to the requirements are needed, and, if necessary, to develop recommendations for revising the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code and regulatory requirements. Part of the work performed in addressing this goal was the development and demonstration of a method to establish in-service inspection priorities through the use of probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) results. The Oconee-3 PRA and the observed weld failure data of the nuclear plants operating in the United States are used to identify and prioritize the most risk-important systems for inspection. Failure modes and effects analysis methodology is then used to identify and prioritize the most riskimportant piping sections of the Oconee-3 emergency feedwater system. Based on the results of this study, this method is demonstrated to be a useful tool for identifying systems and piping sections or welds that need to be inspected.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.