Progress on Seismic Margin Assessment and Fire PSA for Lepreau Refurbishment

Abstract

On July 29, 2005 it was announced that the Province of New Brunswick would proceed with the $1.4 Billion project to refurbish the Point Lepreau Generating Station with Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) as the general contractor. The major activity during the outage would be the replacement of all 380 Fuel Channels, Calandria Tubes and connecting feeder pipes. This activity is referred to as Retube. NB Power Nuclear would also take advantage of this outage to conduct a number of additional repairs, replacements, inspections and upgrades. These collective activities are referred to as Refurbishment. This would allow the station to operate for an additional 25 to 30 years. As part of Refurbishment, NB Power is performing a Level II PSA (Probabilistic Safety Assessment) to complement the current safety analysis, which supports the existing Operating License for the station. The events considered in the PSA include internal fires and seismic events. The approach adopted for fire events is the conventional fire PSA [1] and that for the seismic events analyses is a PSA-based Seismic Margin Assessment (SMA). The PSA is scheduled to be completed at the end of 2007. This paper discusses the progress on the fire PSA and the PSA-based SMA.