Almacén Temporal Centralizado ATC
Earthquake Engineering
Earthquake Engineering for the radioactive waste Complex of buildings ATC
The Almacen Temporal Centralizado (ATC) is a facility that aims to safely store and manage the spent fuel and vitrified high level waste (HLW) generated by the Spanish Nuclear Power Plants for at least 60 years.
Since the beginning of 2012, Enresa (formerly “Empresa Nacional de Residuos Radiactivos, SA”) has been working on the characterization of the site where the ATC will be built, as well as the detailed design of the facility. The location chosen is Villar de Cañas, in the province of Cuenca.
The objective of DYNAMIS ASSOCIATES was to carry out the seismic calculations, taking into account the soil-structure interaction of two of the main lots:
- Lot 2 “ARO”: Almacén de residuos operacionales,
- Lot 3 “AEC”: Almacén espera de contenedores.
The ARO building (ARO-MARE) is composed of a lower level which is buried and destined for waste storage, and a higher level above ground, which is oriented to the operation of the storage process.
The AEC building consists of a surface building with dimensions of approximately 51.3 x 119.4m. Due to it large lengths, the building has two seismic joints, which causes the division of the slab in three zones.
Synthetic accelerograms for Seismic Calculations
To evaluate the seismic stresses, non-linear probabilistic soil-structure interaction calculations were performed. In addition, an innovative methodology has been used to save calculation time. Instead of using the Fast Fourier Transformation of five artificial accelerograms to calculate the response due to transient motion, a new approach based on Random Vibration Theory (RVT) was used to calculate the statistical mean of the frequency-dependent responses. In this approach, input motion is specified as a mean acceleration response spectrum at a specified damping ratio. Concrete cracking was taken into account according to ASCE-04.
The Almacen Temporal Centralizado (ATC) is a facility that aims to safely store and manage the spent fuel and vitrified high level waste (HLW) generated by the Spanish Nuclear Power Plants for at least 60 years.
