Dr. Mihai A. Diaconeasa of the PRA Group was awarded a grant for a collaborative project led by the Idaho National Laboratory on multi-attribute risk analysis techniques.
Much of safety and security analysis for nuclear power plants is concerned with core damage, offsite radiological release, or theft of special nuclear material; but attacks on facilities can target other consequences, including adverse effects on worker safety, physical plant, generation risk, financial risk, environmental risks, and reputational risk. It has long been understood that risks are best viewed and managed within a broad perspective. Mitigating one type of risk may well affect another, either tending to reduce it or tending to increase it. A well-known example is that in developing a scheme for mitigation of fire risk, it is important not to increase seismic risk by adding fire barriers that are seismically fragile and whose collapse could adversely affect key components. In this work, we will perform case studies using a realistic nuclear plant model to illustrate the benefits of addressing multiple and qualitatively different considerations within a given analysis, in the expectation that the resulting analysis method will lead to better mitigation decisions.