The meeting intends to bring together safety specialists working in the nuclear field and scientists who are interested to contribute to the development of advanced methodologies for natural hazard assessment in the framework of the FP7 Euratom-Project ASAMPSA_E.
Safety assessments of nuclear installations and the definition of the engineering design basis for nuclear power plants require the assessment of extreme natural events with low or extremely low occurrence probabilities, the definition of maximum credible/maximum possible events, or both. Definitions of the design basis of NPPs, for example, require data on events with occurrence probabilities not higher than 10-4 per year. Today, even lower probabilities, down to 10-8, are expected and typically used for probabilistic safety analyses and the examination of so-called design extension conditions.
NPPs are exposed to all types of natural hazards. Hazard assessments are consequently required for a large variety of individual hazards, including seismotectonic, hydrological, meteorological and biological hazards. For these hazards the establishment of the maximum credible/maximum possible events by deterministic methods, and the extrapolation of hazard curves to occurrence probabilities of 10-4 and below by probabilistic approaches is highly challenging for natural sciences.