PROBABILISTIC FIRE RISK ANALYSIS

The evaluation of the risk associated with fires in nuclear power plan ts has attracted considerable attention in the last few years. Detaile d safety assessments have shown that the consequences offices can be s ignificant. Methodologies considering fire in probabilistic safety ana lyses have been developed such that a probabilistic fire risk analysis can serve as an additional tool for the safety assessment of a nuclea r power plant. An approach which is being developed for the nuclear po wer plants in Germany is presented in some detail. Major steps of this approach are the qualitative screening process to identify critical f ire zones and the quantitative event tree analysis to assess fire caus ed frequencies of initiating events and core damage states.