SINAPS@: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY FRENCH RESEARCH PROJECT TO IMPROVE THE SEISMIC RISK ANALYSIS OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES

Abstract eng:
This contribution gives an overview of the SINAPS@ French research project (http://www.institutseism.fr/en/projects/sinaps/) which motivated the mini-symposium, and then linking all the presentations. SINAPS@ is a French acronym meaning “Earthquake and Nuclear Facility: Improving and Sustaining Safety” behind which a broad research community has gathered in order proposing an integrated seismic risk assessment for nuclear facilities safety. This five-year project has been funded by the French government after the 2011 Japanese Tohoku large earthquake and associated tsunami that caused the major accident at the Fukushima Daïchi Nuclear Power Plant. Soon after this disaster, the international community involved in nuclear safety questioned the current methodologies used to account for seismic loadings for nuclear facilities during the design and assessment phases. In this framework worldwide nuclear authorities asked nuclear operators to perform “stress tests” to estimate the capacity of their existing facilities sustaining extreme seismic motions. SINAPS@ aims at conducting a continuous analysis of completeness and gaps in data bases (all data types, from geology, seismology, site characterization and materials), of the reliability or deficiency of models available to describe physical phenomena (prediction of seismic motion, site effects, soil and structure interaction, linear and nonlinear wave propagation, materials constitutive laws in nonlinear domain), and of the relevance or weakness of methodologies used to performed seismic risk assessment. This critical analysis conducted confronting methods, either deterministic or probabilistic, and available data to the international state of the art systematically addresses the uncertainties issue, should improve the seismic margins assessment (Berge-Thierry et al., 2016). The present contribution will present the key issues addressed in SINAPS@ at each step of the whole seismic analysis, focusing on the uncertainties identification, quantification and propagation. Preliminary results and recommendations from SINAPS@ will be illustrated, some of them opening up perspectives of discussions with stakeholders beyond the SINAPS@ partnership (i) to reconsider current nuclear French practice and (ii) consequently motivate reference mandatory texts improvements (that are the Basic Safety Rule (RFS2001-01) defining the seismic hazard and the ASN/2/01 Guide providing design rules of nuclear civil engineering structures, respectively lastly updated in 2011 and 2006).

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