Vulnerability models for environmental risk assessment. Application to a nuclear power plant containment building

Abstract

Environmental risk management consists of making decisions on human activities or construction designs that are affected by the environment and/or have consequences or impacts on it. In these cases, decisions are made such that risk is minimized. In this regard, the forthcoming paper develops a close form that relates risk with cost, hazard, and vulnerability; and then focuses on vulnerability. The vulnerability of a system under an external action can be described by the conditional probability of the degrees of damage after an event. This vulnerability model can be obtained by a simplicial regression of those outputs, as a response variable, on explanatory variables. After a theoretical explanation, the authors present the case study of a nuclear power plant containment building. Once a given overpressure is registered inside the containment building, three possible outputs are to be considered: serviceability, breakdown, and collapse. The study consists of three steps: (a) modelling the containment building using the finite element method; (b) given an overpressure, simulating uncertain parameters related to material constitutive equations in order to obtain the corresponding proportions; (c) performing a simplicial regression to obtain a meaningful vulnerability model. The simulation provides normalized-to-unity outputs under the overpressure conditions. The obtained vulnerability model is in definite correspondence with previous results in nuclear power plant safety analysis reports.