Study on sandstorm hazard evaluation for inland nuclear power plant site

Abstract

With the development of nuclear power industry, the environmental conditions of alternative nuclear power plant sites are becoming more and more diversified, and the inland area can be also selected as potential nuclear power plant site. Dust storm is one of the typical external hazards needed to be considered for inland sites. This study proposes a framework for evaluating the dust storm hazard at a nuclear power site. In this paper, we perform the dust storm hazard analysis based on the probabilistic approach to evaluate the annual exceedance frequency of dust storm under different intensities. An inland area is studied as an example, and the historical data are used for the analysis. We do the hazard analysis to obtain the probability that the dust storm intensity exceeds a range of threshold values within the target site. The final result is given as sandstorm hazard curves, which show the annual exceedance frequency of different dust storm intensities. The hazard curves can be helped to decide design basis or used in external hazard risk analysis for inland nuclear power plant sites.