A code for simulation of human failure events in nuclear power plants: SIMPROC

Over the past years, many Nuclear Power Plant organizations have performed Probabilistic Safety Assessments to identify and understand key plant vulnerabilities. As part of enhancing the PSA quality, the Human Reliability Analysis is essential to make a realistic evaluation of safety and about the potential facility's weaknesses. Moreover, it has to be noted that HRA continues to be a large source of uncertainty in the PSAs. Within their current joint collaborative activities, Indizen, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid and Consejo de Seguridad Nuclear have developed the so-called SIMulator of PROCedures (SIMPROC), a tool aiming at simulate events related with human actions and able to interact with a plant simulation model. The tool helps the analyst to quantify the importance of human actions in the final plant state. Among others, the main goal of SIMPROC is to check the Emergency Operating Procedures being used by operating crew in order to lead the plant to a safe shutdown plant state. Currently SIMPROC is coupled with the SCAIS software package (Izquierdo et al., 2008), but the tool is flexible enough to be linked to other plant simulation codes. SIMPROC-SCAIS applications are shown in the present article to illustrate the tool performance. The applications were developed in the framework of the Nuclear Energy Agency project on Safety Margin Assessment and Applications (SM2A). First an introductory example was performed to obtain the damage domain boundary of a selected sequence from a SBLOCA. Secondly, the damage domain area of a selected sequence from a loss of Component Cooling Water with a subsequent seal LOCA was calculated. SIMPROC simulates the corresponding human actions in both cases. The results achieved shown how the system can be adapted to a wide range of purposes such as Dynamic Event Tree delineation, Emergency Operating Procedures and damage domain search. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.