The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Chief of Nuclear Safety (CNS) hosted a two-day technical meeting in Germantown, MD on the characterization and mitigation of Natural Phenomena Hazards (NPH) related to nuclear facilities. The meeting brought together DOE staff, Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff, researchers, and private sector consultants, to discuss and advance the knowledge of various NPH topics, particularly seismic soil-structure interaction (SSI) analysis of DOE and nuclear facilities.
Dr. Payman Tehrani presented a comparative study of time domain vs. frequency domain seismic SSI analysis. His study compared the response of the two approaches for a generic pressurized water reactor containment building.
Dr. Ben Kosbab presented recent work in the area of probabilistic SSI analysis of critical nuclear power plant (NPP) structures. In his talk, Dr. Kosbab presented an approach for treatment of variability in probabilistic SSI analysis and the feasibility of probabilistic SSI analysis in Seismic Probabilistic Risk Assessment (SPRA) of NPPs.
Both projects are supported by recent advances in high performance computing hardware and software, including SC Solutions’ proprietary software SC-SASSI.
More information about the 2016 DOE Natural Phenomena Hazards Meeting is available here.