An Approach to Assess Reliability of Offsite Power as a Site Selection Criteria for a Nuclear Power Plant

Abstract

Various initiating events (IE) trigger the operation of emergency core cooling systems (ECCS) in a nuclear powerplant(NPP).The offsite power - one of the major power source for the ECCS - if reliable, can significantly reduce the chances of station blackout (SBO) and thus the nuclear core meltdowns. Hence, it is important to include the reliability of offsite power as a criterion for site selection of NPP during the planning phase. This paper proposes an approach based on Reliability block diagram (RBD) technique to assess various sites for their suitability to host an NPP in terms of reliability of the offsite power. The proposed approach is discussed as a part of site selection problem for NPP in the Saskatchewan electrical grid having many sites as potential candidates.