Probabilistic risk assessment techniques application

Complexity refers to the difficulty of identifying and quantifying causal links between a multitude of potential candidates and specific adverse effects (Renn and Walker 2007 Renn 2008). A crucial in this respect concerns the applicability of probabilistic risk assessment techniques. If the chain of events between a cause and an effect follows a linear relationship (as for example in car accidents, or in an... 

Rasmussen, N.C. 1981 The application of probabilistic risk assessment techniques to energy technologies. Annual Review of Energy, 6, 123—138. 

However, the application of probabilistic (or quantitative) risk assessment techniques means that there is a need to make judgments about the reliabilities of redundant systems, even when their failure rates are dominated by CMF. Two main approaches have been developed for modeling the effects of CMF in probabilistic (or quantitative) risk assessment ... 

Monte Carlo analysis is a specific probabilistic assessment method that can be used to characterize health risks and their likelihood of occurrence based on a wide range of parameters (Shade and Jayjock 1997). The U.S. EPA s Stochastic Human Exposure and Dose Simulation (SHEDS) model allows for the quantification of exposures based on a probabilistic assessment of multiple exposure pathways and multiple routes of exposure (Mokhtari et al. 2006 US EPA 2003b). Additional applications of probabilistic techniques wiU be discussed in the section below on conducting an uncertainty analysis of reconstructed exposure values. 

II-3. Possible abnormal conditions and their causes, such as failures of protection systems or human errors, need to be identified in safety assessments for incorrect operation. The likelihood, significance and consequences of such abnormal conditions are then assessed by means of an appropriate methodology for risk analysis some examples are given below. Probabilistic safety analysis (PSA) is an established technique in risk evaluation for nuclear power plants [II-l], and much of the experience gained from it is adaptable in simplified form to complex applications involving radiation sources. As noted in para. 3.8, the inability of analyses to account adequately for human factors imposes some limitation on the value of these assessments. 

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