Dr. Diego Mandelli, Idaho National Laboratory, visits CALCE

CALCE recently had a visit from Dr. Diego Mandelli, Risk Assessment and Management Services Department, Idaho National Laboratory (INL), who presented his research ‘Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) for Nuclear Power Plants at INL’ to students, faculty, and staff. The abstract for this presentation can be found below.

Dr. Mandelli specializes in the development of Dynamic PRA methodologies that combine system simulators and stochastic methods to evaluate risks and to perform uncertainty quantification, and he developing data mining and machine learning based algorithms to extract risk-related information from the data generated by Dynamic PRA methodologies in order to improve the identification of system performance and limitations.

Abstract: This talk will cover the main R&D activities currently underway at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) regarding Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) and Risk-Informed applications. These activities are performed under the DOE Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program. Regarding the PRA R&D, the talk will cover the development of Dynamic PRA methods. These methods couple stochastic methods (i.e., sampling methods) with system simulators (e.g., RELAP5-3D and MELCOR) to determine the risk associated to complex systems such as nuclear power plants. Compared to Classical PRA methods they can evaluate with higher resolution the safety impacts of timing and sequencing of events on the accident progression without the need to introduce conservative modeling assumptions and success criteria. In addition, it will be shown how machine-learning and data mining methods can be successfully employed to reduce the required computational resources and create knowledge out of gigabytes of generated data. Some applications of Dynamic PRA methods will be shown ranging from classical initiating event analyses to multi-unit plant and Accident Tolerant Fuel (ATF) analyses. Lastly, the talk will describe two new projects currently underway at INL: Risk Informed Asset Management (RIAM) and Risk Informed Plant Health Management (PHM). The objective of these two projects is to develop methods able to reduce operating costs (e.g., component maintenance, component replacement, surveillance) of existing nuclear power plants while maintaining current safety levels.

Published January 17, 2019