Seismic assessment of a site using the time series method

To increase the safety of a NPP located on a seismic site, the seismic acceleration level to which the NPP should be qualified must be as representative as possible for that site, with a conservative degree of safety but not too exaggerated. The consideration of the seismic events affecting the site as independent events and the use of statistic methods to define some safety levels with very low annual occurrence probability (10-4) may lead to some exaggerations of the seismic safety level. The use of some very high value for the seismic acceleration imposed by the seismic safety levels required by the hazard analysis may lead to very costly technical solutions that can make the plant operation more difficult and increase maintenance costs. The considerations of seismic events as a time series with dependence among the events produced, may lead to a more representative assessment of a NPP site seismic activity and consequently to a prognosis on the seismic level values to which the NPP would be ensured throughout its life-span. That prognosis should consider the actual seismic activity (including small earthquakes in real time) of the focuses that affect the plant site. The paper proposes the applications of Autoregressive Time Series to issue a prognosis on the seismic activity of a focus and presents the analysis on Vrancea focus that affects NPP Cernavoda site, by this method. The paper also presents the manner to analyse the focus activity as per the new approach and it assesses the maximum seismic acceleration that may affect NPP Cernavoda throughout its life-span (∼ 30 years). Development and applications of new mathematical analysis method, both for long - and short - time intervals, may lead to important contributions in the process of foretelling the seismic events in the future. (authors)