A World Tour of Conferences

The Nuclear EDF UK R&D teams travelled across the globe this summer to share and expand their knowledge.

Extreme Value Analysis and Application to Natural Hazards (EVAN) conference, Venice, Italy - July 

Alejandro Pinto sparked interest with his presentation on the Cramer-von Mises (CvM) test, which improves and removes bias in extreme value analysis (EVA).  

EVAN was held in Venice, Italy - an appropriate location given the regular coastal flooding threats that the city experiences. Attendees included the UK Met Office, the Environment Agency, French Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety (IIRSN), France Energies Marines (FEM) and Meteo-France. Moreover, hazard combinations is a growing area of interest and the conference described new applications and improvements to statistical methods.

IRSN use similar methods to us, including the Cumulative Density Function-transformation (CDF-t) method, developed by EDF Group R&D. Sylvie Parey, expert from EDF Group presented the Mean Variance Approach (MVA) for EVA, which has previously been applied by Will Hodder and Yuting Chen on extreme air temperatures and rainfall assessments for UK nuclear sites.

Attending this conference not only provided valuable insights into the latest developments in EVA, but also opened up opportunities for collaboration and innovation, which can enhance our methods and ultimately strengthen our ability to assess natural hazards more accurately and ensure the resilience of our fleet.

Pressure Vessels and Piping 2024 (PVP2024) conference, Seattle, USA - July-August

Ed Horton attended the PVP2024 conference in Seattle, USA, to exchange ideas with industrial experts in structural integrity. Ed, who now works in the Advanced Reactor and Structural Integrity Team, presented the work he completed as part of his EDF-funded PhD; looking at how novel high fidelity material models could be deployed in industrial applications. This lead to some productive conversations, developing new contacts, a broader understanding of the structural integrity community, its priorities, and recent developments and an opportunity to disseminate the cutting edge work being delivered by EDF which could be highly valuable to external organisations, especially AMR vendors and ASME code developers. 

Meeting such key players in the ASME structural integrity community is important at a time EDF sees greater engagement with the ASME community as a key strategic goal of both the SZB LTO programme and AMR development activities.

Royal Meteorological Society’s (RMetS) Annual Weather and Climate conference, Reading, UK - July

Will Hodder presented his work with EDF Group R&D on the representation of sea surface temperature (SST) in gridded reanalysis datasets over the English Channel, which prompted interesting discussions and valuable feedback. SST is an important variable for nuclear power plants - the higher the SST, the less efficient the cooling could be. 

Will also ran a workshop on rethinking climate science in energy systems in collaboration with a meteorologist from the University of Reading. Discussions focused on climate change, observations and modelling of extreme events. 

Feedback from the presentation on the SST work has opened up new avenues of exploration, including potential datasets to help us in assessments by our team and Group. The workshop provided new perspectives from a broad spectrum of scientific experts that will enable us to improve our methods and encourage further collaborations with academics.

Find out more: R&D UK Centre