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John Livingston's

The Nuclear Electrical Engineer

An educational resource for electrical engineers in the nuclear power industry

Here you can find design tips on technical skills like cable and breaker sizing, short-circuit evaluations and more, PLUS deep-dive analysis of nuclear-specific topics like design basis, Tech Specs, UFSARs, and safety-related SSCs — built from primary source documents.

Licensing Basis · Feature

The UFSAR

John Livingston
December 9, 2014 · 1 min read

One of the most popular of the licensing basis documents that you’ll work with (or hear about) is the UFSAR. It stands for updated final safety analysis report. . . .

10CFR50.34 governs the content of the UFSAR. Most sites followed the same structure when writing theirs. For example, most UFSARs have a section in which they explain how they meet or exceed the NRC’s general design criteria. Other examples include Chapter 7, which typically describes a site’s safety-related instrumentation, and Chapter 8, which describes its electrical power systems. Accident scenarios and their responses are typically documented in Chapter 15.

The UFSAR is typically a compilation document, and it will sometimes have sections for the Tech Specs, Emergency Plan, and other LBDs. Usually they are simply one-sentence pointers to other documents like the Tech Specs, which are large enough to be constituted in a separate file. The UFSAR is a good place to look when first learning about a particular system, structure, or component associated with a project.