Overview of Collaborative Research to Assess Tsunami Hazard for Nuclear 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 power plants in the United States. In order to complement research focused on the Pacific Ocean by other organizations, the US NRC sponsored a collaborative research project with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for the purpose of assessing tsunami hazard on the US Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. This research considers landslide and seismic tsunamigenic sources in both the near and the far fields. The first phase of this work, undertaken by the USGS and now nearly complete, 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. As part of the next phase of research, work will be undertaken to refine estimates of hazard on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts for a wide variety of sites. Field investigations will be undertaken by the USGS in key locations of interest which currently lack sufficient existing data. Simultaneously, the MOST tsunami model developed at NOAA will be enhanced to include landslide-based initiation mechanisms. The enhanced MOST model will then be used to investigate the tsunamigenic sources characterized by the USGS to achieve the long-term goals of the US NRC program, which include an estimation of deterministic tsunami hazard levels for the length of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. The potential for probabilistic tsunami hazard assessment will also be explored in the final phases of the program.