Overview of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission collaborative research program to assess tsunami hazard for nuclear power plants on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts

In response to the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, the United States
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (US NRC) initiated a long-term research
program to improve understanding of tsunami hazard levels for nuclear
facilities in the United States. For this effort, the US NRC organized
a collaborative research program with the United States Geological
Survey (USGS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) with a goal of assessing tsunami hazard on the Atlantic and Gulf
Coasts of the United States. Necessarily, the US NRC research program
includes both seismic- and landslide-based tsunamigenic sources in both
the near and the far fields. The inclusion of tsunamigenic landslides,
an important category of sources that impact tsunami hazard levels for
the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts is a key difference between this
program and most other tsunami hazard assessment programs. The
initial phase of this work consisted of collection, interpretation, and
analysis of available offshore data, with significant effort focused
on characterizing offshore near-field landslides and analyzing their
tsunamigenic potential and properties. In the next phase of research,
additional field investigations will be conducted in key locations of
interest and additional analysis will be undertaken. Simultaneously,
the MOST tsunami generation and propagation model used by NOAA will
first be enhanced to include landslide-based initiation mechanisms and
then will be used to investigate the impact of the tsunamigenic sources
identified and characterized by the USGS. The potential for probabilistic
tsunami hazard assessment will also be explore in the final phases of the program.