TABLE OF CONTENTS A comprehensive hazard assessment of nuclear power plants in general is the Reactor Safety Study: An Assessment of Accident Risks in US Commercial Nuclear Power Plants by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) (1975). The work was done by a team led by Professor N.C. Rasmussen and is often referred to as the Rasmussen Report. It is also known as the Reactor Safety Study (RSS) and also as WASH 1400. It is referred to in this appendix as the Reactor Safety Study but elsewhere as the Rasmussen Report. This study was a major exercise involving some 70 man years of work and costing $4 million. The report is a document of nine volumes some 15 cm thick.
The RSS constituted a watershed in probabilistic risk assessment. It not only brought the PRA approach to the fore as an aid in decision-making, but created a framework and brought together the various techniques needed to carry out such a study.
The work is of interest in respect of its methodology, its treatment of particular problems in risk assessment, its compilations of failure data and its presentation and evaluation of risks. Also of interest are the critiques of the report.
The methodology is based on the extensive use of fault trees and event trees and addresses the problem of uncertainty in the results obtained.
The report has been followed by further reports which have developed the methodology. In particular, a treatment of overall PRA methodology is given...
