The planning and scheduling of the operations involved in the outages of nuclear power plants has a great impact in terms of the outage costs (replacement power, labor cost, etc.), use of scarce resources and implementation of safety procedures. Prior to 1979, before the accident at Three Mile Island (TMI), refueling was the driving factor of outages of nuclear power plants: maintenance plans w...

This is a report of the tragic events that befell hospital inpatients and elderly people in the emergency evacuation after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident on March 11, 2011. Before the earthquake and tsunami that preceded the nuclear accident, there were eight hospitals and 17 nursing care facilities located within a 20 km radius of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. ...

Nuclear power plant concrete structures are described and their operating experience noted. Primary considerations related to management of their ageing are noted and an indication of their status provided: degradation mechanisms, damage models, and material performance; assessment and remediation (i.e., component selection, in-service inspection, non-destructive examinations, and remedial acti...

Socio-economic losses associated with the earthquake of magnitude 9 on March 11th, 2011 off the Tohoku coast of Japan are presented and discussed. These include presentation of building damage, casualtyand shelter needs disaggregated for the earthquake and tsunami, but also the implications of the loss of essential utilities in Honshu’s production capacity, and consequences of the Fukushima 1 n...

The first objective data showing the geographical locations of people in Fukushima after the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accident, obtained by an analysis of GPS (Global Positioning System)-enabled mobile phone logs, are presented. The method of estimation is explained, and the flow of people into and out of the 20 km evacuation zone during the accident is visualized.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0172442.].

Recently, especially after the 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, the need for treating residual risks and cliff-edge effects in safety-critical facilities has been widely recognized as an extremely important issue. In this article, the sophistication of seismic designs in safety-critical facilities is discussed from the viewp...

The objective of this program is to design, construct operate, test, and evaluate a prototype integrated monitoring and diagnostic system for a nuclear power plant. It is anticipated that this technology will have wide application to other complex systems (e.g., fossil power plants, chemical processing plants, and possibly air traffic control systems). Over the past decade, the University of Te...