On the significance of international synergy in addressing seismic safety at existing nuclear reactor facilities - Is Armenia NPP a success story?

Despite the progress has been made in addressing seismic safety issues at nuclear installations worldwide, there are still issues that require re-evaluation as a result of new information that arises regarding seismic hazard, revised understanding of site conditions and structural seismic resistance and/or facility life extension request. Since the seismic re-evaluation is a complex process consisting of elements that individually present challenges in our state of understanding of how installations resist seismic loads (i.e., source, path, interaction and dynamic response), issues will always exist given the variation of parameters from site to site. This paper focuses on some of the elements of the re-evaluation process with special attention to nuclear facilities of the former Soviet Union while using the Armenian nuclear reactor facility and its upgrade program as the working example. It presents a discussion on seismic questions that are important to any nuclear facility and it identifies the relevance to the Armenian NPP. Given that one of the main questions addressed in this paper is how the synergy of international organizations influences the resolution of seismic issues that are generally common at nuclear facilities around the world, the Armenian NPP upgrade program is a perfect example for such an assessment since it calls for the resolution of multiple issues while it involves multiple organizations. (author)