Risk, Safety and Large-Scale Systems Analysis - Nuclear Engineering Department

This area of study is devoted to the development of methods and
models and the acquisition of empirical data for assessing the impacts
of emerging technological systems on public health and safety, and
the environment.

Principal Investigator: Kastenberg

Basic research includes:

• the development of deterministic models and the acquisition
  of experimental data for understanding severe accidents in nuclear
  power reactors
• probabilistic methods and models for assessing nuclear power
  plant risk
• optimization methods that integrate mechanistic and probabilistic
  considerations.

Historically, these methods and models focused on complicated systems
or machines composed of pumps, valves, invertors, switches, piping,
electronic control systems, instrumentation, etc. These systems
are amenable to reductionism because second-order effects are small
(can be treated in a linear fashion) and the boundaries are well
defined. Safety considerations involved standard mechanistic models
for heat transfer, fluid dynamics and material behavior, as well
as accepted reliability methods such as fault and event trees. These
complicated systems have now given way to very large-scale complex
systems, in which second order or nonlinear effects become important,
and the boundaries are less well defined. By large-scale, we mean
systems with large dimensionality (or very many variables), and
not necessarily large spatially. Such complex systems may exhibit
chaotic behavior, may be tightly coupled and exhibit emergent properties,
and may exhibit properties that can only be described subjectively.

An initial focus for this new avenue of research is Generation IV
nuclear energy systems, which integrates the nuclear
fuel cycle in terms of high-level radioactive waste disposal, nuclear
reactor safety, overall fuel cycle analysis and economics, safeguards and security.
Other complex large-scale systems considered in this
program include biological systems, environmental and ecological
systems, information systems and electric power distribution systems.
Participating in this work is Professor Kammen.

• Courses on Risk,
  Reliability, Safety and Systems