Dynamic generation of accident progression event trees Original Research Article

Currently, the development and analysis of accident progression event trees (APETs) are performed in a manner that is computationally time consuming, difficult to reproduce and also can be phenomenologically inconsistent. A software tool is presented for automated APET generation using the concept of dynamic event trees. The tool determines the branching times from a severe accident analysis code based on user specified criteria for branching. It assigns user specified probabilities to every branch, tracks the total branch probability, and truncates branches based on the given pruning/truncation rules to avoid an unmanageable number of scenarios. While the software tool could be applied to any systems analysis code, the MELCOR code is used for this illustration. A case study is presented involving station blackout with the loss of auxiliary feedwater system for a pressurized water reactor.