Provides guidance in the assurance of quality of specification, design, implementation, maintenance and use of computer software related to items and activities important to safety in nuclear power plants.

This report provides practical guidance on the methods available for verification of the software and validation of computer based systems in nuclear power plants, and on how and when these methods can be effectively applied. It will be of particular interest to all those involved in the development, implementation, maintenance and use of software and computer based instrumentation and control systems in nuclear power plants.

The present review volume not only covers a wide range of topics pertinent to nuclear science and technology, but has attracted a distinguished international authorship, for which the editors are grateful. The opening review by Drs. Janet Tawn and Richard Wakeford addresses the difficult matter of questioning sci- tific hypotheses in a court of law. The United Kingdom experienced a substantial nuclear accident in the 1950s in the form of the Windscale Pile fire. This in itself had both good and bad consequences; the setting up of a licensing authority to ensure nuclear safety was one, the understandable public sentiment concerning nuclear power (despite the fire occurring in a weapons pile) the other. Windscale today is subsumed in the reprocessing plant at Sellafield operated by British Nuclear Fuels plc and it was inevitable perhaps that when an excess cluster of childhood leukaemia was observed in the nearby village of Seascale that public concern should be promoted by the media, leading to the hearing of a claim of compensation brought on behalf of two of the families of BNFLs workers who had suffered that loss. The review article demonstrates the complexity of und- standing such a claim against the statistical fluctuations inherent and shows how the courts were persuaded of the need to propose a biological mechanism if responsibility were to be held. The Company were undoubtedly relieved by the finding.

These three volumes comprise the papers presented at the ESREL '97 International Conference on Safety and Reliability held in Lisbon, Portugal, 17-20 June 1997. The purpose of the annual ESREL conferences is to provide a forum for the presentation of technical and scientific papers covering both methods and applications of safety and reliability to a wide range of industrial sectors and technical disciplines and, in so doing, to enhance cross-fertilization between them.A broad view is taken of safety and reliability which includes probabilistically-based methods, or, more generally, methods that deal with the quantification of the uncertainty in the knowledge of the real world and with decision-making under this uncertainty.The areas covered include: design and product liability; availability, reliability and maintainability; assessment and management of risks to technical systems; health and the environment; and mathematical methods of reliability and statistical analysis of data.The organization of the book closely follows the sessions of the conference with each of the three volumes containing papers from two parallel sessions, comprising a total of 270 papers by authors from 35 countries.

This report replaces Technical Reports Series No. 239, Nuclear Power Plant Instrumentation and Control: A Guidebook (1984), in particular by changing the emphasis from guidance to summarizing operating experience and discussing new technologies. It provides an up to date overview of nuclear power plant instrumentation and control technology and the background against which such systems are implemented. It is directed to meet the needs of instrumentation and control engineers, but also of nuclear power plant designers and regulators.

Provides the latest details on current best practices and explains how SQA can be implemented in organizations large and small. Also helps readers understand the requirements of the ASQ's CSQE examination.

The present publication provides for the first time information and guidance for defining and implementing quality assurance programmes covering the entire lifecycle of software important to safety. It takes into account the large amount of documentation available, the rapid development of software systems and the need of updated guidance on how to do it.