Forty Years of Earthquake Engineering in the UK Nuclear Industry: Opportunities, Failures and Successes

Thirty to forty years ago engineers seriously began to address the challenges of understanding and mitigating the seismic risk to nuclear facilities in the UK. As new nuclear power plant construction again seems imminent, this paper considers why practices developed as they did. Furthermore the paper reviews certain of the relevant activities, identifying the successes, the failures, and the techniques that were retained too long:

• The influence of the regulator on seismic hazard and on earthquake engineering
• Site specific seismic hazard assessment
• Ground motion recordings
• Civil design standards
• Seismic assessment and strengthening of existing facilities
• Multi-disciplinary approach
• Design basis

As an example of potential improvements in the case of seismic hazard assessment, where site specific probabilistic studies have been compromised by the continued use of generic spectra and may have been tarnished by conservatism, new uniform risk spectra are presented.