The development and management of the nuclear programmes requires compliance with the nuclear safety objectives of the installations for all the lifecycle phases. From this perspective the international experience showed the need for a set of quality assurance standards for components and services in order to support the achievement of the nuclear safety objectives of the nuclear installations As a result mainly of the situation described above the QA issue could be solved based on two different categories of approaches : a TOP-DOWN approach, as shown in IAEA 50-C-Q, or a BOTTOM UP approach as in ISO –9001.1994 Some of the newest methods mentioned before try to evaluate the impact on the quality level/category so that to be able to answer the question what is the available margin on safety and the corresponding change in QA indicator in case of various changes (technical or organizational) impacting on the hierarchical system defining a nuclear programme and a nuclear installation. The method description is described. According to this method a certain quualitative or quantitative QA indicator (like for instance the quality level) is the result of a series of calculations at various levels of the safety hierarchical structure in which the QA programme is integrated, as follows: The level of the macrosubsystems of the nuclear programme/environment The level of the subsystems describing the NPP/nuclear installation The component level of the nuclear installation For each level mentioned above one may use the eigenvalue of the matrix describing the subsystems/components from QA indicators point of view. Each element of the matrix at a given level is the result of the calculations from the previous level. The use of the proposed method allows the calculation of the acceptable deviation from the safety target and its corresponding QA indicator variation as a result of a given deviation in the environement defining the nuclear installation lifecyle phases and activities.(both at macro and micro levels)

SERBANESCU Dan; 

2006-11-15

EC-JRC-IE

JRC34508

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC34508,