A critical reappraisal of nuclear power plant safety against accidental aircraft impact

Abstract The overall problem of nuclear power plant safety against an accidental aircraft impact is discussed in relation with its structural analysis and design. Associated risks, such as fire, which is a potential source of damage for buildings and other structures, are not considered. The paper is divided in two parts. In part I different approaches used for determining the reaction-time curve are discussed. The influence on the results of target motions is examined next. It is shown that for the evaluation of structural response an aircraft-structure interaction analysis is usually an unnecessary refinement, “mean” reaction-time and impact area-time curves being sufficient to define the excitation. Preliminary results for oblique impact are also given. Since the conditional probability of a normal impact is very small, the consideration of oblique impact may become acceptable in future design criteria. In part II, available solutions for the resulting structural dynamic problem are reviewed. The feasibility of resorting to a static analysis is also discussed. Present practices to evaluate floor response spectra are reviewed next. The short-comings of the “deterministic” approach are pointed out. It is proposed to define the excitation as a mean plus a fluctuating force. The latter is treated as a nonstationary random process and the problem solved by numerical integration in the time domain. Although such solutions get prohibitively expensive when the number of degrees of freedom becomes large, results obtained for simple models may help to clarify which are the important variables of the problem.