Benchmark Exercise on Nuclear Safety Engineering Practices

This paper introduces the EU research project Benchmark Exercise on Safety Engineering Practices by presenting the safety engineering concept and methodology applied in the benchmark exercise. The safety engineering concept leans heavily to the principles of model-based systems engineering, aimed to balance the interaction between management of safety requirements, plant design and system safety analyses. Initial results from the first half of the project are demonstrated using the safety engineering process of one of the project case studies as an example. The case study example is presented to concretise the kind of cases to be applied in the benchmarking for the actualization and comparison of safety engineering processes. An important part of safety engineering process is the management, allocation and elaboration of the safety requirements. The topics for the safety engineering process related requirements are explained and the benchmark specific requirements for one topic are stated. Finally, the fulfillment of requirements is evaluated for the example case study and observation on the potential strength and weaknesses of the applied safety engineering process are collected. In the second half of the project, the applied safety engineering processes of project partners will be further studied and compared to create best practices for the verification of evolving and stringent safety requirements against external hazards using efficient and integrated set of safety engineering practices and probabilistic safety assessment.