Southern Nuclear and Georgia Power were the latest nuclear energy providers to install a federally mandated disaster-resistant, concrete-dome equipment-storage facility designed to mitigate the loss of power in the event of an "extreme" natural phenomena. Unveiled at the utilities' Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, near Waynesboro, Ga., the so-called FLEX Dome was designed to withstand 360-mph winds—sufficient for a Category 5 hurricane or a direct hit from a tornado—as well as "event-driven missiles" or a seismic event, according to ABC Domes, which designed and built the structure.
The Vogtle installation is the latest deployment of a FLEX Dome at a U.S. nuclear site. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with input from the nuclear industry, developed the unit based the so-called Diverse and Flexible Mitigation Capability, or FLEX. In 2012, the NRC implemented the multi-pronged strategy to mitigate the potential impacts of "beyond-design-basis external events," such as the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant. In 2011, an earthquake-generated tsunami struck that nuclear facility, causing a loss of on-site and off-site power to the facility's safety cooling systems, resulting in a melting of the plant's three nuclear cores.