(GRS 086) Proceedings of the OECD/BMU-Workshop on Special Issues of Level 1 PSA, Cologne, May 27-29, 1991

With the increasing use of complex technologies there is a growing need to evaluate their safety. From a practical engineering point of view the engineer would say, we take care of some engineering precautions. The risk expert, however, would say, nevertheless, it should be necessary to quantify on a broad full scale of quantiative risk assessment. The methodology of probabilistic safety analysis allows its predictive valuation. Nuclear engineering has been in the forefront of the development and application of this method. For example in the Reactor Safety Study on US Nuclear Power Plants published in 1975 the risk of an entire technology was investigated systematically and quantified for the first time.
When the Rasmussen Study was published there was an intensive and to some extent also a controversial discussion on the use of probabilistic methods for quantifying safety aspects or respectively quantifying contributions to risk resulting trom various technologies. How to quantify risk, may be an open question. Nevertheless the Rasmussen Study was a milestone introducing PSA methods on a full scale for quantifying safety levels for nuclear power plants