Just wondering France is planning 14 new reactors what’s the safety protocol if an earth quake hits a reactor and does it do much damage to the environment around it
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All plants have to be designed to seismic requirements.
Safety systems are designed to category 1 requirements. Which means they cannot fail.
Category 2/1 systems are designed so that they could fail, however they cannot break anything that is category 1.
Anything that is category 2 cannot become a flying object that damages other systems.
For every plant, we come up with a maximum ground shaking force. Then engineers use models to determine how much shaking every floor/wall/structure in the plant sees. Finally, the systems which are built either are tested on a shaker table or built in such a way that they can withstand the shaking.
There are full time seismic qualification engineers at every nuclear power plant which manage these requirements.
No reactor has had safety system damage due to an earthquake. Even the Fukushima reactors, they all survived the earthquakes and were capable of safe shutdown (until they were flooded….. which is a whole different qualification program).
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