Methodology of seismic-response-correlation-coef fi cient calculation for seismic probabilistic safety assessment of multi-unit nuclear power plants

In 2011, an earthquake and subsequent tsunami hit the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing simultaneous accidents in several reactors. This accident shows us that if there are several reactors on site, the seismic risk to multiple units is important to consider, in addition to that to single units in isolation. When a seismic event occurs, a seismic-failure correlation exists between the nuclear power plant's structures, systems, and components (SSCs) due to their seismic-response and seismic-capacity correlations. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the multi-unit seismic risk by considering the SSCs' seismic-failure-correlation effect. In this study, a methodology is proposed to obtain the seismic response-correlation coefficient between SSCs to calculate the risk to multi-unit facilities. This coeffi-cient is calculated from a probabilistic multi-unit seismic-response analysis. The seismic-response and seismic-failure-correlation coefficients of the emergency diesel generators installed within the units are successfully derived via the proposed method. In addition, the distribution of the seismic-response correlation coefficient was observed as a function of the distance between SSCs of various dynamic characteristics. It is demonstrated that the proposed methodology can reasonably derive the seismic response-correlation coefficient between SSCs, which is the input data for multi-unit seismic probabilistic safety assessment. (c) 2020 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 study proposes a method to calculate the risk of multi-unit facilities by obtaining the seismic response-correlation coefficient between components within a nuclear power plant. The research demonstrates that the proposed methodology can successfully derive the seismic response-correlation coefficient between different components, which is essential for multi-unit seismic probabilistic safety assessment.