Nuke risk model may improve national security

“We have been applying the PRA model to [the country’s three nuclear power plants] for more than 24 years,” said Yang Chao-yie, deputy minister of the Atomic Energy Council, Executive Yuan.

PRA calculates the probability and consequences of system failures so that the appropriate contingencies can be formulated.

Yang said that in nuclear facilities, “deviation tests” are used to evaluate the impact of repair work on the safety of the whole system. During “fire drills,” the PRA model assesses the weaknesses of the system, the likeliness of a mistake, and the possible consequences if anything goes wrong.

“The PRA provides concrete evaluation norms to judge the work at a nuclear power plant,” said Yang. The same PRA “objective quantification” based on scientific knowledge could be used to formulate emergency scenario contingencies for large, complex systems such as refineries, liquefied natural gas (LNG) lines, public transportation, and even national security as a whole, Yang said.

The Department of Homeland Security and other agencies in the U.S. have been applying PRA models to protect the nation’s infrastructure from terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

PRA defines risk as a product of three factors: the frequency or likelihood of a threat (F), the vulnerability of a target (V), and the costs and consequences (C). Risk (R) is related to these factors in the formula R=FVC. According to experts working on these projects, the difficult part is assigning values to F, V and C because each domain has different specifications.

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