Periodic Reporting for period 3 - BESEP (Benchmark Exercise on Safety Engineering Practices)
Période du rapport: 2022-09-01 au 2024-06-30
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 safety requirement verification helping the licensing process of nuclear power plant new builds and upgrades. The outcome of the benchmark exercise is especially beneficial to EU countries planning to build new nuclear power plants, but without previous experience in the implementation of Safety Engineering practices. The overall objective of BESEP is to support safety margins determination by developing best practices for safety requirements verification against external hazards, using efficient and integrated set of Safety Engineering practices and probabilistic safety assessment.
In the first, second and third periods, the main results achieved are the following:
- The external hazards of interest in the benchmark exercise have been identified;
- Important safety requirement topics have been identified, analysed, and assigned for external hazards;
- Safety requirement topics have been elaborated to a set of more detailed safety requirements to create the benchmark baseline used in the cross-case and cross-group comparisons;
- Information on the risk-significance thresholds for the external hazards used in the PSA studies of BESEP countries has been collected and conclusions have been made;
- Project partner specific case studies have been specified and self-evaluations have been carried out for the case studies against the benchmark baseline;
- The partner specific case studies have been compared, e.g. for the interconnections and flow of information between different safety analyses, reflecting the integration of the applied safety engineering process;
- Generalised case studies have been created from the partner specific cases and the generalised case studies have been compared, e.g. for the amount of effort used and the risk significance of the involved external hazard and SSC, reflecting the efficiency of the applied safety engineering process;
- The experience from the benchmark exercise have been collected and summarized as recommendations under following topics:
- i) Best practices to conduct safety engineering,
- ii) Closer connection between safety analyses to verify adequacy of safety margins,
- iii) Graded approach to the deployment of more sophisticated safety analysis methods;
- Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) has been established for the project and two workshops and public dissemination events with IAB has been arranged;
- Collaboration platforms and dissemination channels have been created for the project;
- Several training events and BESEP summer school have been arranged;
- Project results have been disseminated in several meetings and conferences.
- The external hazards of interest in the benchmark exercise have been identified;
- Important safety requirement topics have been identified, analysed, and assigned for external hazards;
- Safety requirement topics have been elaborated to a set of more detailed safety requirements to create the benchmark baseline used in the cross-case and cross-group comparisons;
- Information on the risk-significance thresholds for the external hazards used in the PSA studies of BESEP countries has been collected and conclusions have been made;
- Project partner specific case studies have been specified and self-evaluations have been carried out for the case studies against the benchmark baseline;
- The partner specific case studies have been compared, e.g. for the interconnections and flow of information between different safety analyses, reflecting the integration of the applied safety engineering process;
- Generalised case studies have been created from the partner specific cases and the generalised case studies have been compared, e.g. for the amount of effort used and the risk significance of the involved external hazard and SSC, reflecting the efficiency of the applied safety engineering process;
- The experience from the benchmark exercise have been collected and summarized as recommendations under following topics:
- i) Best practices to conduct safety engineering,
- ii) Closer connection between safety analyses to verify adequacy of safety margins,
- iii) Graded approach to the deployment of more sophisticated safety analysis methods;
- Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) has been established for the project and two workshops and public dissemination events with IAB has been arranged;
- Collaboration platforms and dissemination channels have been created for the project;
- Several training events and BESEP summer school have been arranged;
- Project results have been disseminated in several meetings and conferences.
High-level IAEA safety requirements and wide variety of national safety requirements from the partner countries have been collected and allocated under concise set of requirement topics. The original requirements have been further elaborated to specific BESEP requirements representing the different requirement topics. The BESEP requirements will be applied in the benchmark exercise. The outcome of the benchmark exercise will help in the harmonization of licensing requirements and provide best practices for the verification of evolving and stringent safety requirements against external hazards.