Risk assessment in an R D environment: Lessons learned
- Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)
The US Department of Energy (DOE) is undergoing what can be called a [open quotes]cultural change.[close quotes] This paper presents some of the good and bad experiences of that change in the areas of risk analysis and assessment. Its focus is on the research lab environment. Some of the problems encountered at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) include rapidly evolving and radically changing research initiatives, rapid-fire budget swings, and the ever-changing priorities that all of us face in a rapidly changing world. New construction projects suffer because of illogical funding procedures that do not allow for the inclusion of risk assessment activities at their appropriate time. What to do with existing facilities which are difficult and expensive to upgrade to today's standards is also a large-scale problem. With the rapidly changing missions throughout the DOE complex, organizations must be prepared to quickly cope with safety analysis requirements far more sophisticated and voluminous than just a few short years ago. The Savannah River Site (SRS), operated for the DOE by the Westinghouse Savannah River Company, has been a pioneer in the development of methods required to perform quantitative risk assessments for a wide variety of facilities in a cost-effective manner. Industrial, nuclear, and chemical hazards are analyzed. The process begins with the identification of the hazards and continues with the accidents that result in releasing the hazard to a recipient, quantification of the frequency and consequence, and finally determination of the risks. These risk assessments provide the basis for hazards classification of facilities that govern design requirements for structures and equipment, safety analysis reports that define the accident risks that are compared to acceptance criteria, and technical safety requirements that describe the operating envelope to ensure that no undue risk is imposed on the operators or the general public.
- OSTI ID:
- 5794767
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-930601-; CODEN: TANSAO
- Journal Information:
- Transactions of the American Nuclear Society; (United States), Vol. 68; Conference: American Nuclear Society (ANS) annual meeting, San Diego, CA (United States), 20-24 Jun 1993; ISSN 0003-018X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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