Feasibility study on earthquake early warning and operational earthquake forecasting for risk mitigation at nuclear power plants

Carlo Cauzzi (1) , Yannik Behr (1) , John Clinton , Thomas Le Guenan (2) , John Douglas (2) , Samuel Auclair (2) , Stefan Wiemer (1) , Jochen Wössner (1) , Marta Caprio (1) , Georgia Cua (1)

1 Swiss Seismological Service
2 BRGM - Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières (BRGM)

Within the framework of the EC-funded project REAKT (Strategies and Tools for Real Time Earthquake Risk Reduction, FP7, contract no. 282862, 2011-2014, www.reaktproject.eu), a task concerns feasibility study and initial implementation of Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) and timedependent seismic hazard analyses aimed at mitigating seismic risk at nuclear power plants (NPPs) in Switzerland. This study is jointly carried out by academic institutions (the Swiss Seismological Service at ETHZ and BRGM) and in cooperation with swissnuclear, the nuclear energy section of swisselectric, an umbrella organisation for the nuclear power plants in Switzerland, which provide about 40% of the electricity needs of the country. Briefly presented in this contribution are the main investigations carried out and results obtained throughout the development of this task, with special focus on: a) evaluating the performances of the selected EEW algorithm (the Virtual Seismologist, VS) in Switzerland and California, in terms of correct detections, false alerts, and missed events; b) embedding the VS algorithm into the earthquake monitoring software SeisComP3 (www.seiscomp3.org) routinely used by the Swiss Seismological Service for earthquake detections and locations; c) customising the User Display (a graphical interface originally developed at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) during Phase II of the ShakeAlert project in California) for optimised use at Swiss NPPs; d) presenting synthetic time-dependent hazard scenarios for Switzerland and e) attempting to associate the above input data with potential mitigation actions and related cost and benefits for NPPs in Switzerland.

Keywords: earthquake risk; earthquake early warning; operational earthquake forecasting; nuclear power plants; decision-making

Domains: Sciences of the Universe [physics]; Earth Sciences; Geophysics [physics.geo-ph]; Physics [physics]; Physics [physics]; Geophysics [physics.geo-ph]; Environmental Sciences; Global Changes

Carlo Cauzzi, Yannik Behr, John Clinton, Thomas Le Guenan, John Douglas, et al.. Feasibility study on earthquake early warning and operational earthquake forecasting for risk mitigation at nuclear power plants. Second European Conference on Earthquake Engineering and Seismology (A joint event of the 15th European Conference on Earthquake engineering & 34th General Assembly of the European Seismological Commission), Aug 2014, Istanbul, Turkey. Paper 139. ⟨hal-00968817⟩