Issues of the Seismic Safety of Nuclear Power Plants

Katona, Tamás János

doi:10.5772/65853

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Most extensive programs for natural hazard evaluation and upgrading and justification of operating plant safety have been implemented in the USA and several Eastern-European countries, where the operators should deal with the issues of underestimation of the seismic hazard for the design basis. Summary description of these programs is given in [25][26][27][28]. Events, like the Great Tohoku Earthquake, triggered an overall review, correction, and justification of hazard evaluation at the plants (see the stress test initiated by the European Union and the reviews and upgrading programs in several countries, e.g., [29,30]).…”

Section: Difficulties Of the Safe Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a consequence of this, the detailed evaluation of hazard and the engineering treatment of consequences for nuclear power plants remained for long time an early stage of development. The post-Fukushima hazard reviews revealed the issue (a summary description of the issue and relevant publications is given, for example, in [28]). It's trivial, an earthquake happens when two blocks of the earth suddenly slip past one another, and the energy stored up in the block is released in the form of seismic waves.…”

Section: Surface Displacementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, the safety significance of displacement depends on the measure and type of displacement. There are sufficient engineering knowledge and analytical tools to evaluate the consequences of surface displacements as it is stated in [15,28,47,48].…”

Section: Surface Displacementmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Natural Hazards and Nuclear Power Plant Safety

Katona¹

2019

Natural Hazards - Risk, Exposure, Response, and Resilience

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The safety of nuclear power plants with respect of natural hazards can be ensured by adequate characterization of hazards and proven design solutions to cope with natural hazard effects. Design and severe accident management require characterization of very rare event. The events identified for the design basis and for the safety analysis are with annual probability 10 −4-10 −5 and 10 −7 , respectively. In this chapter, a brief insight into the actual issues of natural hazard safety of nuclear power plants and related scientific challenges is provided. The state of the art of ensuring safety of nuclear power plants with respect to natural hazard is briefly presented with focus on the preparedness to the accident sequences caused by rare natural phenomena. The safety relevance of different hazards and vulnerability of NPPs to different hazards are discussed. Specific attention is made to the non-predictable phenomena with sudden devastating effects like earthquakes and fault ruptures. Post-event conditions that affect the on-site and off-site accident management activities are also considered. The "specific-to-nuclear" aspects of the characterization of hazards are discussed. This is a great challenge for the sciences dealing with hazard characterization. The possibility for ensuring nuclear safety is demonstrated presenting cases when the nuclear power plants survived severe natural phenomena.

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Section: Difficulties Of the Safe Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Surface Displacementmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Natural Hazards and Nuclear Power Plant Safety

Katona¹

2019

Natural Hazards - Risk, Exposure, Response, and Resilience

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“…It has to be mentioned that a probabilistic liquefaction hazard assessment has been made for the Paks site applying methodologies [29,30] (see in [16][17][18][19][20]31]). The real site soil conditions at Paks are a little different from those used in the above case study.…”

Section: Evaluation Of the Probability Of Liquefaction Due To Marginmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessment of Adequate Margin to Liquefaction for Nuclear Power Plants

Katona

2018

Science and Technology of Nuclear Installations

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Design of nuclear power plant shall provide an adequate margin to protect items ultimately necessary to prevent an early large radioactive release in the case of earthquakes exceeding those considered in the design. An essential question is how large the margin should be to be accepted as adequate. In the practice, depending on the country regulation, a plant margin of at least 1.4 or 1.67 times the design basis peak ground acceleration is required to be demonstrated. The catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant revealed the fundamental experience that the plants designed in compliance with nuclear standards can survive the effects of the vibratory ground motion due to disastrous earthquake but may fail due to effects of phenomena accompanying or generated by the earthquakes. Liquefaction is one of those secondary effects of beyond-design basis earthquakes that should be investigated for NPPs at soil sites. However, the question has not been investigated up to now, whether a “margin earthquake”, vibratory effects of which the plant can withstand thanks to design margin, will not induce liquefaction at soil sites and will not result in loss of safety functions. In the paper, a procedure is proposed for calculation of the probability and margin to liquefaction. Use of the procedure is demonstrated on a case study with realistic site-plant parameters. Criteria for probability for screening and acceptable probabilistic margin to liquefaction are proposed. The possible building settlement due to margin earthquake is also assessed.

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“…Recently, resistance to seismic loading has been considered significantly with numerous programs being undertaken in many countries since several structures have been damaged by large earthquakes throughout history (International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], 2001[IAEA], , 2003Králik, 2017). The evaluation of the seismic safety of nuclear facilities, including research reactors, has assumed importance following the accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant (Katona, 2017). This is particularly important for old facilities especially nuclear power plants and high-power research reactors that are more susceptible to aging issues.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seismic and Structural Evaluation of Philippine Research Reactor-1 Structures

Olivares,

Asuncion-Astronomo,

Gregorio

et al. 2022

MJST

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The Philippine Research Reactor 1 (PRR-1), operated by the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute (PNRI), is the first and only nuclear facility that has operated in the country until its shutdown in 1988. The civil structures of PRR-1 were originally designed for a peak ground acceleration of 0.2 g and the response of these structures in the event of an earthquake is a major concern from the viewpoint of operational safety considering that the structures are more than 60 years old. In support of the planned reoperation of the facility with the Subcritical Assembly for Training, Education, and Research (SATER), PNRI contracted the services of a private company to undertake the structural evaluation of the existing facilities. The contract included geotechnical investigation and seismic hazard analysis, which are reported in this paper. Key results demonstrated that the PRR-1 structures are suitable for operating SATER and are classified as Hazard Category 4. Moreover, the findings from the evaluation will serve as the basis for the retrofitting and refurbishment activities that will be conducted for the PRR-1 facility to meet the life-safety performance objective of SATER.

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Issues of the Seismic Safety of Nuclear Power Plants

Cited by 6 publications

References 18 publications

Natural Hazards and Nuclear Power Plant Safety

Natural Hazards and Nuclear Power Plant Safety

Assessment of Adequate Margin to Liquefaction for Nuclear Power Plants

Seismic and Structural Evaluation of Philippine Research Reactor-1 Structures

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