Satisfying safety goals by probabilistic risk assessment. (Q2644063)

This book is on diverse aspects of probabilistic risk assessment (PRA), ranging from mathematical foundations of reliability theory to detailed descriptions of governmental regulatory policies for dealing with extreme risks. In the first part of the book different approaches to safety goals, categorization by safety significance, hazard identification, guided by the development of ``safety first'' construction principles are described, that nowadays in many areas are dominating, originating, e.g., from the Chernobyl accident. The aim is to support decision making under risk, the ``emphasis is placed on uncertainties, dependent failures, defense-in-depth, early detection and treatment, good engineering practices, sufficient safety margins'' (from the preface). The author discusses regulatory documents and the connections to risk assessment on a technical level. The chapters on mathematical methods of PRA are mainly (with some extensions of) from a previous book of the author, only the section on dependent failures is written anew. The interested reader is heavily burdened by an enormous amount of abbreviations, so in many cases it is not possible to jump directly into specific chapters or sections. Some abbreviations can be found with the help of the appendix (THERP = the technique for human error rate prediction), some are even not included, into the appendix (BPCS or HA = human action = human activity at different places, where we may ask, whether such an abbreviation really makes sense).