Safety reviews for nuclear power plants

As well as supervisory reviews, nuclear power plants are regularly subject to safety reviews in order to establish the latest safety and security standards. Here, the basic safety and security concept and interaction between various safety systems are reviewed with a view to ensuring compliance with the latest requirements. Up until the 2002 amendment to the German Atomic Energy Act (AtG), nuclear power plant operators generally performed safety reviews on a voluntary basis. Safety reviews comprise the following three aspects:

• Deterministic safety status analysis
• Probabilistic safety analysis and
• Deterministic security analysis.

In order to ensure uniform safety reviews, the Federation and states with a nuclear power plant developed documentation to be used as a basis for performing safety reviews. The result of this joint effort were the guides for the periodic safety review of nuclear power plants. The first of these is the "Basics of the periodic safety review", which is complemented by the guides describing the deterministic analyses in Deterministic safety analysis and the probabilistic analyses in "Probabilistic safety analysis" (PSA). Plant security is covered in "Deterministic security analysis" (DSA).