This paper describes the work and results of the preliminary Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) for a research reactor in the design phase. This preliminary PSA was undertaken to assess the level of safety for the design of a research reactor and to evaluate whether it is probabilistically safe to operate and reliable to use. The scope of the PSA described here is a Level 1 PSA which addresses the risks associated with core damage. After reviewing the documents and its conceptual design, eight typical initiating events are selected regarding internal events during the normal operation of the reactor. Simple fault tree models for the PSA are developed instead of the detailed model at this conceptual design stage. A total of 32 core damage accident sequences for an internal event analysis were identified and quantified using the AIMS-PSA. LOCA-I has a dominant contribution to the total CDF by a single initiating event. The CDF from the internal events of a research reactor is estimated to be 7.38E-07/year. The CDF for the representative initiating events is less than 1.0E-6/year even though conservative assumptions are used in reliability data. The conceptual design of the research reactor is designed to be sufficiently safe from the viewpoint of safety.