An official website of the European Union How do you know?      
European Commission logo
JRC Publications Repository Menu

State-of-the-art and lessons learned from advanced safety studies and stress-tests for critical infrastructures - STREST Reference Report 1

cover
Critical infrastructures are the backbone of modern society and provide many essential goods and services. Recent events have highlighted the vulnerability of these infrastructures to natural hazards and the risk for cascade effects with potentially major and extended socio-economic impacts. The STREST project aims at developing a stress test framework to determine the vulnerability and resilience of non-nuclear critical infrastructures. This report summarizes the state-of-the-art and the lessons learned from post-Fukushima stress tests and safety assessment studies for nuclear power plants, from guidelines for hazard and risk assessment of critical infrastructures, and finally from recent catastrophic events. The turn from ‘absolute safety’, which is unreachable, to the more realistic concept of ‘risk awareness’ has been made and several methods for risk assessment are implemented. Further efforts are required towards the harmonisation of methods for the identification of natural hazards for critical infrastructures and for the safety assessment in case of beyond-design (cliff-edge) events, considering common cause failures for multiple unit sites and multiple sites as well as cascade effects in interdependent systems. Where necessary, for instance in the case of floods, hazard assessment should include climate-change projections. Enriched knowledge on the vulnerability of key critical infrastructures and their components together with improved preparedness are key to avoiding future disasters.
TSIONIS Georgios;  ZWICKY Peter; 
2016-04-11
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC100946
978-92-79-57566-2 (print),    978-92-79-57502-0,   
1018-5593 (print),    1831-9424 (online),   
EUR 27806,    OP LB-NA-27806-EN-C (print),    OP LB-NA-27806-EN-N (online),   
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC100946,   
10.2788/703813 (print),    10.2788/036273 (online),   
NameCountryCityType
Datasets
IDTitlePublic URL
Dataset collections
IDAcronymTitlePublic URL
Scripts / source codes
DescriptionPublic URL
Additional supporting files
File nameDescriptionFile type 
Show metadata record  Copy citation url to clipboard  Download BibTeX
Items published in the JRC Publications Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated. Additional information: https://ec.europa.eu/info/legal-notice_en#copyright-notice