WASH-1400

WASH-1400, 'The Reactor Safety Study (later known as NUREG-75/014) was a report produced in 1975 for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by a committee of specialists under Professor Norman Rasmussen.

[1] In the years immediately after its release, WASH-1400 was followed by a number of reports that either peer reviewed its methodology or offered their own judgments about probabilities and consequences of various events at commercial reactors.

[1] A succession of reports, including NUREG-1150, the State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequence Analyses and others, have carried-on the tradition of PRA and its application to commercial power plants.

Specifically, the report concluded, using the methods and resources and knowledge available at the time, that the probability of a complete core meltdown is about 1 in 20,000 per reactor per year.

[2] In the years since its publication, WASH-1400 has occasioned much discussion of its methods and has seen the rise of competing judgments about the probabilities and consequences of adverse events in commercial nuclear power reactors.

[6][1] In January 1979, the NRC issued a policy statement in which it accepted numerous criticisms of WASH-1400 raised by the Lewis Report, and it withdrew any endorsement of the executive summary.

[8] Work continued on PRA including NUREG-1150 and an ongoing study being performed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission called the State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequence Analyses (SOARCA)[2].

It concluded that "Some plants are located on the sea shore where the possibility of tsunami, and waves and high water levels due to hurricanes exist.