Evaluation of allowed outage time considering a set of plant configurations

Allowed outage time (AOT) is the maximum time for which certain safety equipment can be put out of the operation without the plant is put in a safer operating state. A method for risk informed evaluation of AOTs is developed, which enables consideration of a set of plant configurations in the evaluation. The method bases on risk measures obtained from probabilistic safety assessment, e.g. conditional change of core damage frequency considering selected plant configurations. The results of selected examples show that better methods and more data included into the models may reduce the conservatism in the evaluations and may contribute to increased flexibility about decisions on AOT.