Seismic capacity re-evaluation of the 480V motor control center of South Korea NPPs using earthquake experience and experiment data

The recent seismic events that occurred in South Korea have increased the interest in the re-evaluation of the seismic capacity of nuclear power plant (NPP) equipment, which is often conservatively estimated. To date, various approaches-including the Bayesian method proposed by the United States (US) Electric Power Research Institute-have been developed to quantify the seismic capacity of NPP equipment. Among these, the Bayesian approach has advantages in accounting for both prior knowledge and new information to update the probabilistic distribution of seismic capacity. However, data availability and region-specific issues exist in applying this Bayesian approach to Korean NPP equipment. Therefore, this paper proposes to construct an earthquake experience database by combining available earthquake records at Korean NPP sites and the general location of equipment within NPPs. Also, for the better representation of the seismic demand of Korean earthquake datasets, which have distinct seismic characteristics from those of the US at a high-frequency range, a broadband frequency range optimization is suggested. The proposed data construction and seismic demand optimization method for seismic capacity re-evaluation are demonstrated and tested on a 480 V motor control center of a South Korea NPP. (c) 2021 Korean Nuclear Society, Published by Elsevier Korea LLC. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

This paper proposes a method to re-evaluate the seismic capacity of nuclear power plant equipment in South Korea by constructing an earthquake experience database and optimizing the seismic demand. It demonstrates and tests the method on a motor control center in a South Korean nuclear power plant.