[en] As part of a research and development project funded by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU), GRS is developing a generic level 1 PSA for a research reactor based on the methodological state of science and technology. The aim of the project is the development of PSA competence at GRS in relation to research reactors (also regarding plant- and safety technology). In this project, the development and application of PSA methods are in the foreground. No risk assessment should be carried out for the examined reference reactor. It is therefore adequate to make appropriate simplifications in some areas of PSA which, however, should not materially affect the usability of the PSA results for methodological evidence. This paper presents the status of a Level 1 PSA development process for a German reference research reactor. The research reactor being analysed is an open-pool reactor with 20 MW thermal power and one fuel element. One hot and one cold neutron source produce neutron fluxes which are guided by beam tubes to the experimental halls. Additionally, radioactive isotopes for medical applications can be produced with the reactor. The relevant initiating events and accident sequences during power operation are, e. g., control rod withdrawal with maximum speed, loss of offsite power, loss of converter plate cooling or loss of coolant outside the pool. The initiating events pool leakage, seismic hazard or aircraft crash are relevant for all operational states. The initiating event frequencies have been mostly determined based on the operating experience of German research reactors with a thermal power > 1 MW and which were in operation beyond the year 2003. Damage states can be fuel element damage and converter plate damage. Main safety functions required to reach the safety goals after an initiating event are reactor shutdown functions and cooling system functions. Event sequence analysis and derivation of success criteria in the PSA are based on the Safety Report. Selected event sequences are evaluated by means of thermal hydraulic calculations. The unavailability of safety functions is computed by means of fault trees, which are the result of systems analyses performed for safety systems as well as for operating systems credited for cooling functions after initiating events. The PSA model also includes simplified modelling of the power supply. The used reliability data for single failures are mainly based on an IAEA data source (TECDOC-930) /IAE 97/. The data have been applied to the research reactor using the super-population method (a two-stage Bayesian approach). Common cause failure data are mainly taken from a database comprising the operating experience in German nuclear power plants. The quantification of the PSA model shows that the generic data used are very conservative and partly have very high uncertainties. This leads to results that are not representative for the investigated reactor. For this reason, no absolute frequencies for damage states are indicated, but the relative contributions of the initiating events to the overall result. The results of this research project were presented to the international scientific audience at the IGORR / RRFM 2019 in Jordan and the “International Topical Meeting on Probabilistic Safety Assessment and Analysis (ANS-PSA 2019)” in Charleston, USA.