PEER Arizona strong-motion database and GMPEs evaluation

This report summarizes the products and results of a study on the collection, processing, and analysis of earthquake ground-motions recorded in Arizona at several recording stations within 200 km from the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in central Arizona. The recorded ground motion in Arizona were compiled and processed according to the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center’s (PEER) record-processing standards. Shear wave velocity profiles at ten recording stations were measured through the spectral analysis of surface wave dispersion technique. Additionally, “kappa” a measure of energy dissipation in the top 1 to 2 km of the crust, was estimated by three methodologies. The average κ0 (kappa at zero-kilometer distance) was estimated from all sites as 0.033 sec. Finally, response spectra of the recorded ground motions in Arizona were compared with those predicted by the NGA-West2 ground motion prediction equations at large distances in Arizona. The comparison showed that overall the recorded 5% damped response spectral ordinates were over predicted by the NGA-West2 models by a range of 0-0.35 natural log units for events occurring in Central California, and by a range of 0.2-0.7 natural log units for events occurring in Southern California and the Gulf of California

Camels and Climate Resilience: Adaptation in Northern Kenya

In the drylands of Africa, pastoralists have been facing new challenges, including those related to environmental shocks and stresses. In northern Kenya, under conditions of reduced rainfall and more frequent droughts, one response has been for pastoralists to focus increasingly on camel herding. Camels have started to be kept at higher altitudes and by people who rarely kept camels before. The development has been understood as a climate change adaptation strategy and as a means to improve climate resilience. Since 2003, development organizations have started to further the trend by distributing camels in the region. Up to now, little has been known about the nature of, reasons for, or ramifications of the increased reliance on camels. The paper addresses these questions and concludes that camels improve resilience in this dryland region, but only under certain climate change scenarios, and only for some groups.This study was funded by The Royal Geographical Society with Institute of British Geographers Thesiger-Oman Fellowship

Fleet servicing facilities for servicing, maintaining, and testing rail and truck radioactive waste transport systems: functional requirements, technical design concepts and options cost estimates and comparisons

This is a resource document which examines feasibility design concepts and feasibility studies of a Fleet Servicing Facility (FSF). Such a facility is intended to be used for routine servicing, preventive maintenance, and for performing requalification license compliance tests and inspections, minor repairs, and decontamination of both the transportation casks and their associated rail cars or tractor-trailers. None of the United States' waste handling plants presently receiving radioactive wastes have an on-site FSF, nor is there an existing third party facility providing these services. This situation has caused the General Accounting Office to express concern regarding the quality of waste transport system maintenance once the system is placed into service. Thus, a need is indicated for FSF's, or their equivalent, at various radioactive materials receiving sites. In this report, three forms of FSF's solely for spent fuel transport systems were examined: independent, integrated, and colocated. The independent concept was already the subject of a detailed report and is extensively referenced in this document so that capital cost comparisons of the three concepts could be made. These facilities probably could service high-level, intermediate-level, low-level, or other waste transportation systems with minor modification, but this study did not include any system other than spent fuel. Both the Integrated and Colocated concepts were assumed to be associated with some radioactive materials handling facility such as an AFR repository

Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Assessment of Seismically Induced Landslide for Bakacak-Dϋzce Region

Earthquake induced slope instability is considered as one of the major sources of the earthquake hazards, especially in the near fault regions. Simplified tools as Newmark's Sliding Block (NSB) analogy are commonly used to represent the slope stability during ground shaking since the outcome of this analogy is quantitative, larger NSB displacement values indicate higher seismic slope instability risk. Recently, empirical NSB displacement prediction models based on single or multiple ground motion intensity measures are proposed to analyze the slope instability hazard in a probabilistic manner. Within the contents of this study, the most compatible NSB displacement model with the regional ground motion characteristics is selected and incorporated into the vector-valued probabilistic seismic hazard assessment framework. The NSB displacement hazard curves are constructed for Asarsuyu Region where a large-scaled seismically induced landslide was observed during 1999 Duzce earthquake. The NSB displacement hazard results are compared with the dynamic analysis results that were conducted immediately after the earthquake and measured slope displacements