A review of 15 years full-scale seismic testing at the HDR

The HDR Safety Program is carried out by the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center (KfK) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Research and Technology (BMFT). The Program has been subdivided into several Sub Projects according to the main activities in the field of Reactor Safety Research and actual questions of licensing procedure and public interest. This presentation deals with the earthquake investigations, exclusively. The general objective of the project is the experimental verification of calculation tools and procedures. To get an objective picture about the capability of design calculation methods, the activities within the whole program are usually carried out as a joint effort by various parties: while KfK is responsible for the performance of the experiments, data acquisition, comparisons and evaluations, the calculations are performed by specialized institutions. Here, the project management tries to maintain a reasonable balance between industrial participants, indepen dent institutions and authorities responsible for the licensing of nuclear power plants. Besides the independence of the results obtained, this procedure has another advantage: the findings and conclusions of the evaluation process are directly transferred to the engineering community.