St. Germain, Shawn W.

DOE OSTI2024

Tools And Methods to Analyze Plant Outage Schedule and Assist Schedulers in Improving Outage Resilience

Refueling outages of nuclear power plants (NPPs) are considered one of the most critical phases throughout the plant lifetime. In such instances, tens of thousands of activities (e.g., maintenance, surveillance) are performed in a short amount of time (typically 2-3 weeks unless major backfitting or modernization projects are carried out) by a large number of crews (e.g., electricians, mechanics) that are hired as contractors. As a consequence, a plant outage can be expensive not only in terms of costs (e.g., contractor labor, material), but also in terms of loss generation since the plant is taken off the grid during the full outage duration (an indicative metric is about 1.2M$/day of loss of revenue). Thus, there is a continuous need to decrease the economic impact of outages on plant finances. This can be done by: decreasing the frequency of plant outages (e.g., from 18 to 24 months), reducing the time to complete the outage, and reducing the risk of outage delays. The Optimization of Outage Activities project under the Risk Informed Systems Analysis Pathway (RISA) sponsored by Department of Energy (DOE) Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program focuses on developing tools and methods to support NPPs with outage schedule optimization. The developed tools and methods are designed to analyze plant outage schedule with the goal of identify critical elements in the schedule that might pose a high risk of delays. These methods and tools can be considered resource-centric in the sense that they address outage challenges as a resource optimization problem. In this context, resources are either time and crews; outage delays occurs when either (or both) resources are insufficient to complete the set of tasks assigned at a specific time instant of the outage. This report provides details on how plant resources (time and crews) can be allocated in such a way that delays are minimized. In this respect, two classes of methods have been developed: the first one focuses on the time resource and how variability of the time to complete outage tasks may impact outage delays. The second one integrates available resources to assess when dailies activities should be performed such that the risk of outage delays are minimized.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2022

A Dynamic Risk Framework for the Physical Security of Nuclear Power Plants

This paper describes ongoing work within the Light Water Reactor Sustainability pathway at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to optimize the security and cost of nuclear power plants. It introduces the dynamic risk assessment tool developed at INL, Event Modeling Risk Assessment using Linked Diagrams (EMRALD). EMRALD is leveraged to optimize the security posture of a nuclear power plant by integrating force-on-force (FOF) simulations and operator mitigation actions, including dynamic and flexible coping strategies (FLEX). To illustrate the methodology, four attack scenarios are modeled in a commercially available FOF simulation tool using a hypothetical nuclear power plant facility. The simulation results provide valuable insights into possible attack outcomes, as well as the probabilistic risk of a core damage event given these outcomes. Safety mitigation procedures are modeled in EMRALD dependent on the attack outcomes by considering human operator uncertainties. The results demonstrate that the number of armed responders can be optimized, while still maintaining the same protection level as the initial security posture. The proposed modeling and simulation framework of integrating FLEX equipment with FOF models enables the nuclear power plants to credit FLEX portable equipment in the plant security posture, resulting in an efficient and optimized physical security system.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗