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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.

Risk, Safety & Large-Scale Systems Analysis
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 applying this new avenue of research is on 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, and 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