Eunsring maximum safety while enhancing economic benefit is one of most important goal of In the of US Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) program. Optimization of the safety margins will provide best practice to achieve this goal which can also lead to cost reduction. Under the LWRS framework, the Risk-Informed Systems Analysis (RISA) Pathway has been focusing on the optimization of safety margin and minimization of uncertainties to ensure both safety and economics at the highest level. One of the important activity of the pathway is to deploy risk-informed analysis tools to related nuclear industry to support precise representation of safety margins and factors that contribute to cost and safety. The deployed risk-informed analysis tools therefore need highest techical maturaty so that industry can use immediately with strong credibility. The pathway uses various simulation tools to cover entire nuclear fuel cycles and safety. However, the tools should have a capability to support risk-informed decision making for both probabilistic and deterministic elements of safety. The RISA Pathway, therefore, performs a comprehensive assessment of technical maturity and verification and validation (V&V) status of selected tools to improve adaptability to the industry. 

The techincal maturity assessment comprises three work scope: define requirements based on risk-informed concept; investigate and review development and V&V status for technical maturity assessment; and identify technical gap and propose improvement to meet RISA toolkit requirements. The requirements which risk-informed tools should have is set by using Requirement Traceability Matrix (RTM) cocept to capture the requirements from user and developer of the project or software. The importance of each requirements are evaluated by Phenomena Identification and Ranking Technology (PIRT) which systematically gathers information and ranks the importance of the information. Finally, degree of the maturity will be measured by Technology Readiness Level (TRL) for estimating the maturity of the technologies during the development and acquisition phase of certain technology. A total of nine level are set for RISA Pathway from low level (1\~4) to high (5\~9) which represents from research and development (R&D) status to ready for industrial use.

This paper summarizes development of assessment method and technical maturity evaluation of multi-purpose probabilistic risk analysis tool RAVEN. 


Technical Maturity Assessment of Risk-Informed Safety Analysis Tools

Division / Sponsors: 
Power Division & Nuclear Engineering Division (NED)

Power Conference
Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/POWER/POWER2020/volume/83747

International Conference on Nuclear Engineering
Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/ICONE/ICONE2020/volume/83761

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