Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station of TEPCO is the largest nuclear power station in the world, and it has seven nuclear power plants. As the experience at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station accident in March 2011 involving concurrent core damage at multiple units, it is considered that the risk derived from hazards of Earthquakes and Tsunamis is relatively significant in Japan, and these events have a high likelihood of damaging multiple units simultaneously. Therefore, it is very important to grasp the multi-unit specific risk.
Although there are some unique accident scenarios of Multi-Unit PRA, this paper focuses on the influence of radioactive materials released outside the containment vessel on the accident management of the adjacent unit. The events including core damage and loss of containment function should be considered as the causes of the release of radioactive substances, and operator’s operation or the like should be considered as objects to be adversely affected by them. It is necessary to incorporate that into PRA to confirm the effect on risk.
It is very difficult in terms of the maturity of evaluation method and the calculation load to accurately incorporate consequences derived from time series of various events and complicated interaction into PRA model. Therefore, as the first step in evaluating the risk of influence of radioactive material release on the accident management, some streamlining efforts are implemented according to the purpose. For example, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa unit 6 and unit 7 were set as the target units for model simplification. We also assume the earthquake as the initiating event due to the strong common factor for multi units. Whether or not to be operable in the adjacent plant is set conservatively based on deterministic evaluation.
PRA taking into consideration the radiation influence by multi-unit accident is compared with normal PRA. Some kind of Core Damage Frequency (CDF) such as CDF1 (Core Damage Frequency at which the damage of one or the other of two unit occur), CDF2 (CDF at which the damage of both of units occur) and CDFTOTAL (CDF at which the damage of one or more units occur: CDF1 + CDF2) are quantified, and the degree of this issue is provided. Although the change of CDFTOTAL was insignificant, the necessity of further study was shown from the viewpoint of the amount and timing of radioactive substance released due to an approximately 1.5-fold increase in CDF2.