A Guideline to HRA Data Collection from Simulations

Abstract

Including the Fukushima disaster, most accidents that have occurred for several decades in nuclear power plants (NPPs) commonly pointed out the criticality of an inappropriate human performance to their operational safety. Consequently, a huge amount of effort has been spent to reduce the possibility of critical human errors that probably contribute to the safety of NPPs, and one of the most disseminated approaches is to conduct an HRA (Human Reliability Analysis). Unfortunately, although HRA practitioners generally require a lot of information pertaining to the comprehension of contexts being exposed to human operators, one of the frequently raised problems is a lack of available information.

For this reason, KAERI (Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute) issued a standardized guideline that can be applied to clarify how to systematically collect HRA data in the full-scope simulator of NPPs. To this end, through the review of existing documents that specify (or suggest) required data items for supporting HRA practitioners, a total 89 generic HRA data items are identified. After that, a detailed data collection guideline that allows us to distinguish collectable HRA data items with the associated fact-based measurements (i.e., direct observables and objective surrogates) is proposed. In addition, in order to demonstrate the role of the proposed guideline, a couple of worksheets that are helpful for collecting HRA data from simulations in a systematic way are designed based on simulation records gathered from the requalification training sessions of domestic NPPs. As a result, although several pending problems still exist, it is possible to expect that fact-based HRA data can be secured from simulations, which will be useful for HRA practitioners to reduce the uncertainty (or subjectivity) of HRA results.