Safety of Nuclear Power Plants with Respect to the Fault Displacement Hazard

Abstract

The hazard of permanent ground displacements/deformations can challenge the safety of the nuclear power plants. Increasing knowledge of the hazard and development of methods for structure–fault–displacement interaction motivates the designing of nuclear power plants for permanent ground displacement instead of abandoning the sites that could be affected by this kind of hazard. For the design basis, permanent ground displacement should be defined at the hazard level that complies with the probabilistic criteria for accounting for the natural hazards in the design that also ensure compliance with probabilistic safety criteria. In this paper, a procedure is proposed for the definition of the design basis permanent ground displacement that is based on the deaggregation of seismic design basis hazard. The definition of the displacement for the margin evaluation is also proposed. The feasibility of safe design is also demonstrated for the proposed definition of design basis hazard via qualitative judgement on the sensitivity of the structures, systems and components ensuring the fundamental safety functions with respect to the permanent ground displacement that is supported by existing case studies.

Keywords

• permanent ground displacement
• nuclear safety
• design basis
• safety functions