DESIGN BASIS EARTHQUAKES FOR CRITICAL INDUSTRIAL FACILITIES AND THEIRCHARACTERISTICS, AND THE SOUTHERN HYOGO PREFECTURE EARTHQUAKE, 17 JANUARY 1995

This paper deals with how to establish the concept of the design basis earthquake (DBE) for critical industrial facilities such as nuclear p ower plants in consideration of disasters such as the Southern Hyogo p refecture earthquake, the so-called Kobe earthquake in 1995. The autho r once discussed various DBEs at the 7th World Conference on Earthquak e Engineering. At that time, the author assumed that the strongest eff ective PGA would be 0.7 G, and compared the values of accelerations of a structure obtained by various codes in Japan and other countries. T he maximum PGA observed by an instrument at the Southern Hyogo prefect ure earthquake in 1995 exceeded the previous assumption of the author, even though the results of the previous paper had been pessimistic. A ccording to the experience of the Kobe event, the author will point ou t the necessity of the third earthquake S-s adding to S-1 and S-2 of p revious DBEs. (C) 1998. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.