A reliability analysis of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Plant containment/confinement Annulus Filtration System

This thesis presents a reliability analysis of the Containment/Confinement Annulus Filtration System of the proposed Clinch River Breeder Reactor Plant. This analysis does not investigate the capability of the system; but rather the undependability of the system is estimated, and those components most important to the system undependability are identified. A new technique for performing a common cause failure analysis is used in this analysis to reduce the cost of analysis.

For the assumptions made in this analysis, the expected value of the system undependability, that is, the probability the system does not start or (logical or) does not complete the mission, is 0.675 for a thirty day mission. Based on the uncertainty in the input data, there is roughly a 95 percent likelihood that the undependability lies between 0.14 and 0.999. These bounds reflect no uncertainty in the system modeling.