- Author
-
Salley, M. H.
|
Dreisbach, J.
|
Hill, K.
|
Kassawara, R.
|
Najafi, B.
|
Joglar, F.
|
Hamins, A.
|
McGrattan, K. B.
|
Peacock, R. D.
|
Gautier, B.
- Title
- Verification and Validation: How to Determine the Accuracy of Fire Models.
- Coporate
- Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Electric Power Research Institute
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
Electricite de France
- Journal
-
Fire Protection Engineering,
No. 34,
34,36,38,40,42,44,
Spring 2007
- Keywords
-
fire models
|
verification
|
validation
|
fire protection
|
nuclear power plants
|
ASTM E 1355
|
NFPA 805
- Identifiers
- experimental uncertainty as a metric for evaluating fire models; model accuracy
- Abstract
- Worldwide, risk-informed and performance-based analyses are being introduced into fire protection engineering practice, and the commercial nuclear power industry is no exception. In the last 15 years, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) directed a change in its policy to use risk-informed methods, where practical, to make regulatory decisions. As a result of this change, in the area of fire protection, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) completed development of the 2001 edition of NFPA 805, "Performance-Based Standard for Fire Protection for Light-Water Reactor Electric Generating Plants." The NRC amended its fire protection requirements in July 2004 to allow existing reactor licensees to voluntarily adopt the fire protection requirements contained in NFPA 805 as an alternative to the existing prescriptive fire protection requirements. This allows plant operators and the NRC to use fire modeling and fire risk information, along with prescriptive requirements, to ensure that nuclear power plants can be safely shut down in the event of a fire. This article provides a brief description of the work performed to assess the relative accuracy of fire models for nuclear power plant applications.