Developing Component-Specific Prior Distributions for Common Cause Failure Alpha Factors

Abstract

This report presents the development of component-specific common cause failure (CCF) prior distributions for five component categories: pump, valve, strainer, generator, and other. For ease in comparing these component-specific CCF priors with the 2015 generic CCF priors, the same method used to develop the 2015 generic CCF priors was also employed in this report, along with the same set of failure data (1997–2015) featured in INL/EXT-21-43723. For selected CCF templates, this report also evaluates the effects of applying component-specific priors to CCF parameters.