WASH-1400
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WASH-1400, '(The) Reactor Safety Study' was a report produced by a committee of specialists under Professor Norman Rasmussen in 1975 for the USNRC. It is thus often referred to as the Rasmussen Report. It considered the course of events which might arise during a serious accident at a (then) large modern Light Water Reactor. It estimated the radiological consequences of these events, and the probability of their occurrence, using a fault tree/event tree approach. This technique is called Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA).
The report concluded that the risks to the individual posed by such stations were acceptably small, compared with other tolerable risks. Specifically, the report concluded that the probability of a complete core meltdown is about 1 in 20,000 per reactor per year.
The study was peer-reviewed by the 'Lewis Committee' in 1977, which broadly endorsed the methodology as the best available, but cautioned that the risk figures were subject to large uncertainty.
The PRA methodology became generally followed as part of the safety-assessment of all modern nuclear power plants. In the 1990s, all US nuclear power plants submitted PRAs to the NRC under the Individual Plant Examination program [1].
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