Risk Assessment: Tools, Techniques, and Their Applications

3.2 Risk and Consequence

Newton's first law states that every action has an equal or greater reaction (4). Relating this to risk and consequence, it can be stated that every human action has a consequence. Human actions, of course, range from drinking a glass of pure water that has very positive consequences to launching a nuclear war that has very detrimental consequences. With every action humans undertake, they are making a calculation that the results of that action will have a positive, neutral, or a minimally negative outcome. The actions are the risks, and the outcomes are the consequences. In the course of a day, humans make hundreds of decisions, and some of these decisions have major implications on the rest of a person's life.

Driving is always a good model of risk. Harold Blackman once stated that if every human activity were as safe (unsafe) as driving, risk analysts would not be needed (Private communication with Harold Blackman, director of the Center for Advanced Energy Studies). What does this mean? Well, driving is a very unsafe activity. Around 40,000 people are killed in the United States alone from driving-related accidents (5). People are generally more afraid of flying than of driving or riding in a car. If flying were as unsafe as driving then the airline industry would go away. If nuclear power plants operated as unsafely as humans drive, the world would be highly contaminated with radionuclides.

On any given day, drivers can be observed committing some ...