CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTUREHow Will Tropical Cyclones Impact Coastal Critical Infrastructure — Including Nuclear Reactors — in the Future?
As populations grow and more infrastructure is built in coastal areas, understanding these risks is essential. The Bay of Bengal’s low-lying coastal area and dense population make the region in Southeast Asia highly vulnerable to flooding.
Powerful cyclones can push seawater miles inland, threatening densely populated communities and critical infrastructure built along coastal areas. A combination of exposure and complexity makes the Bay of Bengal in Southeast Asia a powerful test case for scientists seeking to better understand how tides, storm surge, river flows and sea level rise interact to drive extreme coastal flooding.
To better anticipate the region’s rare but potentially devastating floods, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are using advanced computer simulations to create thousands of tropical cyclone scenarios.
The research helps reveal how extreme storm tides could affect key coastal sites, including nuclear power plants, providing information that could guide safer infrastructure planning in one of the world’s most vulnerable coastal regions. Their findings, published in npj Natural Hazards, could inform operations and guide future plant siting.
Simulating Cyclones to Predict Flood Risks
The research team used Argonne’s Laboratory Computing Resource Center to simulate thousands of years of tropical cyclones under a range of atmospheric conditions. The researchers focused on storm-tide risks, which they define as the highest simulated water levels during a storm.
Assessing risks to nuclear infrastructure requires estimating low frequency events (extreme storm tides), which occur less often but pose significant threats. Natural hazard risks are often expressed in terms of event frequency. For example, a 50-year flood — one that is estimated to occur only once in a 50-year period — may be an acceptable risk for thermal power plants, but nuclear facilities require estimates for rarer events, such as 1,000-year floods. This makes it challenging to estimate risks from natural hazards since worldwide records of storm paths and intensity extending beyond 50 to 100 years aren’t available.
Nuclear infrastructure safety depends on using rebuilt data from related datasets or creating realistic predictions of storm events. The researchers used the second approach to generate a long historical record of storm surges along the coast of the Bay of Bengal.
Their simulations showed how changes in cyclone paths and strength could reshape flood risks. Historical cyclones, such as Cyclone Sidr (2007) and Cyclone Hudhud (2014), were used to test the accuracy of the models. The models used physics-based methods that do not rely on the small number of recorded tropical cyclones that have made landfall. Depending solely on historical records can either underestimate or overestimate flood risks.
