Project Objectives

The ASAMPSA_E (Advanced Safety Assessment Methodologies: extended PSA) project aims at examining in detail how far the PSA methodology is able to identify any major risk induced by the interaction between a NPP and its environment, and to derive some technical recommendations for PSA developers and users. The project is open to European (and non-European) organisations having responsibility in the development and application of PSAs in response to the regulator requirements.

Definition used for this project

An extended PSA (probabilistic safety assessment) intends to calculate the risk induced by the main sources of radioactivity (reactor core and spent fuel storages) on a nuclear site, taking into account all plants operating states for each main source and all possible accident initiating events affecting one NPP or the whole site.

An extended PSA should cover for example:

• risk contribution from both reactors and spent fuel pools,
• risk contribution from:

1. internal initiating events
2. internal hazards (internal flooding, internal fire, etc.)
3. single and correlated external hazards (earthquake, external flooding, external fire, extreme weather conditions or phenomena, oil spills, industrial accident, explosion, etc.)
4. possible combinations of previous events

The ASAMPSA_E project will develop guidance documents with the objective to help European stakeholders to develop efficiently such extended PSA and verify that all dominant risks are identified and managed.

Launched after the Fukushima accident, the ASAMPSA_E project will pay attention to the risks induced by possible natural extreme external events and their combinations.