Seismic Isolation Working Meeting Gap Analysis Report

The ultimate goal in nuclear facility and nuclear power plant operations is operating safety during normal operations and maintaining core cooling capabilities during off-normal events including external hazards. Understanding the impact external hazards, such as flooding and earthquakes, have on nuclear facilities and NPPs is critical to deciding how to manage these hazards to expectable levels of risk. From a seismic risk perspective the goal is to manage seismic risk. Seismic risk is determined by convolving the seismic hazard with seismic fragilities (capacity of systems, structures, and components (SSCs)). There are large uncertainties associated with evolving nature of the seismic hazard curves. Additionally there are requirements within DOE and potential requirements within NRC to reconsider updated seismic hazard curves every 10 years. Therefore opportunity exists for engineered solutions to manage this seismic uncertainty. One engineered solution is seismic isolation. Current seismic isolation (SI) designs (used in commercial industry) reduce horizontal earthquake loads and protect critical infrastructure from the potentially destructive effects of large earthquakes. The benefit of SI application in the nuclear industry is being recognized and SI systems have been proposed, in the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) 4 standard, to be released in 2014, for Light Water Reactors (LWR) facilities using commercially available technology. However, there is a lack of industry application to the nuclear industry and uncertainty with implementing the procedures outlined in ASCE-4. Opportunity exists to determine barriers associated with implementation of current ASCE-4 standard language.