Use of PCs and workstations for criticality safety analysis

Making effective use of the best available computer technology has long been a feature of U.K. criticality safety analyses. In recent years, the industry's drive for improvements in design safety assessment practice has been supplemented by increasing commercial awareness, bringing further emphasis to the consideration of cost-effectiveness in criticality computation. Consequently, there has been an evolution of computing facilities seen by U.K. criticality assessors from the mainframe terminals of the 1970s through minicomputers in the 1980s to graphical workstations and, most recently, personal computers (PCs) in the 1990s. These moves have been initiated by the availability of hardware capable of providing adequate performance and facilitated by cooperation and subsequently formal collaboration between British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) and the Atomic Energy Authority (AEA) in the field of software development.