During the week of March 23-27, 2015, the NRC’s IRDP participated in a workshop (7th China-U.S. PSA Workshop) with contributions from Sarah Lennon (Department of Energy), Lee Gebert (Argonne National Laboratory), Earnest Kee (South Texas Project), and Zahra Mohaghegh, Tatsuya Sakurahara, and Justin Pence (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and Glenn Kelly and Weidong He from AdSTM, LLC. The workshop covered the general principles and applications of risk-informed regulation and risk-informed decision making. The host of the workshop was the China National Energy Administration, and the organizer was the Suzhou Nuclear Power Research Institute.
The content of the workshop included the history of U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) risk-informed activities and programs, overview of regulations of PSA applications in Chinese nuclear power plants, risk communication, using risk-informed applications for risk management, industry applications for risk-informed decision making: challenges and benefits, the paradigm of systematic causal modeling for risk-informed regulation, the Reactor Oversight Program (ROP), risk-informed PSA in SSCs’ safety classification, safety culture and organizational causal modeling for risk-informed regulation, SDP for fire protection systems at nuclear power plants, an evaluation to optimize industry investments in risk-informed applications, and advanced importance measure analysis for large scale risk-informed industry applications. There were a total of 72 Chinese attendees representing 28 Chinese nuclear energy organizations/entities. Following the workshop, the U.S. presenters were given a tour of the Daya Bay nuclear power plant site, which has six pressurized water reactors.