Risk Assessment: Tools, Techniques, and Their Applications

3.1 Introduction

In March 2011, a terrible 9.0 earthquake occurred off the coast of Japan, and this generated an equally devastating tsunami (1). Subsequent to these two natural events several nuclear power plants had catastrophic failures, of which at this writing, have not been fully ascertained. The natural events could not be predicted. In fact, earthquake prediction is much less understood than is forecasting the weather (2). However, the risk of a nuclear plant having a catastrophic failure, even a meltdown after an earthquake, has been analyzed (3). At some point, the benefit of having nuclear electrical power was found to be greater than the risk of a nuclear reactor meltdown. In this chapter, the concept of risk and consequence is discussed.