Evaluation of the economic simplified boiling water reactor human reliability analysis using the SHARP framework

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 35).General Electric plans to complete a design certification document for the Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor to have the new reactor design certified by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. As part of the design process, the design control document was produced in 2006, and it includes a description of the human reliability analysis performed as part of the reactor's probabilistic risk analysis. The problem is to verify the claim that the human reliability analysis was performed according to the Systematic Human Action Reliability Procedure (SHARP). The seven step method was compared directly to the actions documented by General Electric. Each step was identified and the actions within the steps were identified and evaluated to verify that no rules of SHARP were in contention with the analysis. The reason for using the SHARP method instead of revisions and improvements of the SHARP method was determined and more detailed analysis will be performed in later phases of the reactor design, but the human reliability analysis quantified with general human error probabilities was still a conservative estimate of the human reliability.(cont.) The results showed that General Electric performed a human reliability analysis in agreement with the SHARP method. The Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor human reliability analysis is ready for more detailed analysis and quantification of human interactions in the next phase of development.by Phillip Eng Dawson.S.B