Climate Change Challenges to the Safety of Nuclear Installations

In consideration of the current practice in Member States in relation to hazard evaluation, design, and operation at nuclear installations for nuclear safety challenges posed by climate change, this coordinated research project will focus on the most relevant safety issues affecting climate change-related hazards and corresponding protection measures at nuclear installations.  Climate change has an important role on increasing the risk associated with weather related hazards such as droughts, wildfires, heat waves, floods, rotational winds, and storm surges.  The increasing severity and frequency of weather-related hazards due to climate change poses challenges to nuclear installations. 
The planned CRP will proceed through research on hazard and operational provisions, investigating the resilience of new and existing nuclear infrastructures to climate-related extreme scenarios.  The impact of climate change on relevant weather-related hazards will be analyzed as part of the research effort through collection and comparison of national practices.  In the case of flooding vulnerability at river and coastal sites, this CRP will include a benchmark study to analyze selected cases for deterministic and probabilistic hazard assessment, uncertainty management, and adaptation/resilience to extreme weather conditions. 
 The CRP will particularly contribute to SDG 13.1, "Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries" by ensuring proposed and existing nuclear power plant sites are adequately evaluated for flooding hazards, as well as feed into SDGs 7.a and 9.