Uncertainty can be either an opportunity or a risk. Every construction project begins with the expectation of project performance. To meet the expectation, construction projects need to be managed through sound risk assessment and management beginning with the front-end of the project life cycle to check the feasibility of a project. The Construction Industry Institute’s (CII) International Project Risk Assessment (IPRA) tool has been developed, successfully used for a variety of heavy industry sector projects, and recently elevated to Best Practice status. However, its current format is inadequate to address the unique challenges of constructing the next generation of nuclear power plants (NPP). To understand and determine the risks associated with NPP projects, the goal of this thesis is to develop tailored risk framework for NPP projects that leverages and modifies the existing IPRA process. The IPRA has 82 elements to assess the risks associated with international construction projects. The modified IPRA adds five major issues (elements) to consider the unique risk factors of typical NPP projects based upon a review of the literature and an evaluation of the performance of previous nuclear-related facilities. The modified IPRA considers the sequence of NPP design that ultimately impacts the risks associated with plant safety and operations. Historically, financial risks have been a major chronic problem with the construction of NPPs. This research suggests that unstable regulations and the lack of design controls and oversight are significant risk issues. This thesis includes a consistency test to initially validate whether the asserted risks exist in actual conditions. Also, an overall risk assessment is performed based on the proposed risk framework for NPP and the list of assessed risk is proposed through a possible scenario. After the assessment, possible mitigation strategies are also provided against the major risks as a part of this thesis. This study reports on the preliminary findings for developing a new risk framework for constructing nuclear power plants. Future research is needed for advanced verification of the proposed elements. Follow-on efforts should include verification and validation of the proposed framework by industry experts and methods to quantify and evaluate the performance and risks associated with the multitude of previous NPP projects.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1982.

Graduation date: 1998

Five sediment samples were collected in Bua on the Swedish west coast, near two industries, a paper mill, and a nuclear power plant. The two industries use water in their processes and have long been associated with releases of different substances, such as PCBs, and other chlorinated compounds. The environmental impact by the two industries is believed to be significant. The aim of the project was to examine the sediments close to both the water intake and water output to determine if these industrial activities have in any way changed the composition of the sediments. The sediments were extracted by Soxhlet extraction, followed by a deactivated silica and an acidic silica clean-up and then analysed by using a gas chromatograph coupled to a mass spectrometer, (GC-MS) with electron ionization, EI+, mode used in full scan mode. Each mass spectra were analysed by comparing them to the NIST database from 1998. The results were inconclusive since the peaks were not properly resolved, causing a poor correlation to the NIST database. One batch was specifically analysed for polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) by using an atmospheric pressure gas chromatograph (APGC) coupled to a mass spectrometer (MS). The PCB analysis provided accurate results, except for the Ringhals intake where the MS became saturated due to the high levels. The river Viskan also showed high levels of PCB. The congener pattern from PCBs found near Ringhals intake resembled an Aroclor pattern from Aroclor 1248. Since the Aroclor pattern is only seen in Ringhals intake, the source is most likely from the small harbour and not from either of the industries.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-64).

No description available.

The long-term operational safety of nuclear power plants is of utmost importance. Seismic isolation has been shown to be effective in reducing the demands on structures in many applications, including nuclear power plants (NPP). Many designs for Generation III+ NPP include a large passive cooling tank as a measure of safety that can be used during power failure. In a large seismic event, the fluid in the tank may be excited, and while the phenomenon of fluid-structure interaction (FSI) has also been studied in the context of base isolated liquid storage tanks, the effect on seismically isolated NPP has not yet been explored. This thesis presents a two-part study on a base isolated NPP with friction pendulum bearings. The first part of the study compares the usage of a linear fluid model to a nonlinear fluid model in determining tank and structural demand parameters. The linear fluid model was found to represent the nonlinear fluid model well for preliminary analysis apart from peak sloshing height, which it consistently underestimated. The second part of the study uses a linear fluid model, an empty tank model and a rigid fluid model to investigate the influence of FSI on the structural response of an isolated NPP compared to a fixed base NPP. In general, the response of a fixed base NPP considering FSI using a linear fluid model can typically be bound by the results assuming an empty tank and assuming a full tank with rigid fluid mass. However, this does not hold for the base isolated NPP, as the peak isolation displacement for an NPP with a linear fluid model at design depth is greater than the peak isolation displacement than the same NPP with an empty tank and with a rigid fluid model. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Electrical cabinet fires occur frequently in commercial and industrial facilities. However, the severity of these fire events varies widely, making it difficult to estimate the fire growth and size with certainty. This study aims to identify the significant parameters that affect electrical cabinet fires, which are quantified as the heat release rate (HRR), and properly categorize them. With this knowledge, optimal parameter-response relationships can be developed to predict the electrical cabinet fire behavior. Statistical analysis conducted in this study on historical fire incident data revealed that the fires in Nuclear Power Plants (NPP) were primarily associated with electrical cabinets. The database used in this research was an electronic version of the publicly available Updated Fire Event Database developed by Electric Power Research Institute, including 2,111 fire events. 540 of these events were labeled as being challenging fires with 74.2% of these challenging fire events being due to eleven selected fire types. Electrical cabinets were found to represent a majority (40.7%) of all the challenging fire events. Although historically conducted electrical cabinet fire experiments sought to explore the influence of parameters on HRR, the parameters were not systematically varied to statistically quantify which parameters were most important/relevant. Research in this study used statistical analysis on a series of simulation results on electrical cabinet fires from the computational fluid dynamics code Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS). Simulation matrices were developed and evaluated using fractional factorial Design of Experiments (DOE) to screen the importance of different parameters on the electric cabinet HRR. Based on statistical analysis of the results, the combustible material surface area was found to be the most significant parameter followed by cabinet volume, combustible configuration, burning duration, and combustible material heat release rate per unit area. Material ignition temperature was found to not be statistically significant. The last phase of this research assessed the robustness of the electrical cabinet parameters on the predicted HRR with more detailed simulations. Two investigations were undertaken. To identify the nonlinear effects of parameters on the electrical cabinet fire HRR, a Response Surface Methodology (RSM) based Central Composite Design (CCD) was used to create a simulation matrix that would allow statistical analysis of important parameters as well as their effects on the fire heat release rate while keeping the combustible configuration inside the cabinet constant. A series of simulations were conducted to explore the impact of combustible configuration and ignition source location while keeping all other variables consistent. The analysis revealed that all variables had a statistically significant effect on peak HRR. For the average HRR, both the ventilation area into the cabinet and the ignition source HRR were found to be statistically insignificant. For both output variables, the cabinet volume, material heat release rate per unit area, and material surface area were the most significant parameters. Combustible configuration and ignition source location were also found to be statistically significant. / Master of Science / Electrical cabinet fires are a significant concern for industries, commercial electric plants, telecommunication buildings, and nuclear power plant (NPP) facilities. These cabinets typically represent a metallic enclosure of varying sizes. Additionally, several different electronic components of heterogenous composition and configuration are included within this cabinet. As a result, the fires within the cabinet can propagate to several other nearby components, resulting in large fires that are difficult to suppress. Thus, it becomes necessary to understand the fire behavior of electrical cabinets and the factors influencing fire propagation. Knowing the factors influencing the electrical cabinet fires will enable facilities to have better fire resilience and further prevent multiple components and structures from being damaged by these fires. Statistical analysis of historic fire events validated that the most frequently challenging fires in NPP involve electrical cabinets.Therefore, aA detailed study was conducted to investigate what parameters most significantly affect the size of the electrical cabinet fire, which is quantified as the heat release rate (HRR). The parameters in the study included cabinet volume, ventilation area, combustible fuel detail (ignition temperature, heat release rate per unit area (HRRPUA), burning duration), fuel configuration inside the cabinet, and size of the ignition source. To determine which of these factors significantly impacted the electrical cabinet HRR, a computational fluid dynamics code Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS), was used to predict the fire growth of electrical cabinet fires. After employing a rigorous statistical analysis of the FDS results, the combustible material surface area was found to be the most significant parameter, followed by cabinet volume, combustible configuration, burning duration, and flammable material HRRPUA. The last phase of the research sought to explore the significance of the parameters while developing a nonlinear expression to predict the fire HRR based on cabinet parameters. Given the wide range of electrical cabinet parameters, especially combustible configuration, two studies were conducted where the configuration was fixed or varying with respect to other parameters. For fixed combustible configuration, simulations were conducted with FDS systematically varying the other parameters so their importance could be ranked. Simulations were also performed with all parameters fixed except the combustible configuration and ignition source location. The analysis revealed that all variables had a statistically significant impact on peak HRR. For the average HRR, both the ventilation area into the cabinet and the ignition source HRR were found to be statistically insignificant. For both output variables, the cabinet volume, material heat release rate per unit area, and material surface area were found to be the most significant parameters. Combustible configuration and ignition source location were also found to be statistically significant.

The safety of nuclear power plants must be proved, certified and improved. Probabilistic safety assessments are used to estimate the core meltdown risk, by means of sequential analyses of accidents. In order to assess probabilities of the appearance of these sequences, it is necessary to specifically assess probabilities of operation failures accomplished by human operators in a degraded mode. For this purpose, EDF, the French producer of electricity, developed a method that models failures of human actions, by means of a systematic determination of scenarios corresponding to different failure modes. This method, called MERMOS, has been used for several probabilistic safety assessments. In order to increase its reproducibility and to make it more robust, example missions and scenarios will be built. This set of example analyses will be used by experts assessing human reliability: they will develop studies and deduce results more easily. The purpose of this study involves the creation of a methodology to model existing analyses and human reliability data used in MERMOS. This study consists of optimizing a second generation human reliability assessment method in order to overpass its current weaknesses in an operational context by means of the identification of a set of example analyses. / Master of Science

In this work, a thermoelectric energy harvester system aimed at harvesting energy for locally powering sensor nodes in nuclear power plant coolant loops has been designed, fabricated and tested. Different mathematical modeling methods have been validated by comparing with experimental results. The model developed by this work has the best accuracy in low temperature range and can be adapted and used with any heat sink, heat pipe, or thermoelectric system, and have proven to provide results closely matching experimental data. Using the models, an optimization of the thermoelectric energy harvesting system has been performed which is applicable to any energy harvester of this variety. With experimental validation, the system is capable of generating sufficient energy to power all the sensors and electronical circuits designed for this application. The effect of gamma radiation on this thermoelectric harvester has also been proved to be small enough through radiation experiment. / Master of Science