ABSTRACT
It is clear from the other chapters of this book that risk assessment and risk management means different things to different groups. While there are many different groups involved in the risk field, including engineers, health scientists, social scientists, and environmental scientists, I would like to divide them into just two groups and refer to the two as engineers and environmentalists. The engineer group sees risk assessment as principally a quantification of the “source term” (i.e., a release condition), while the environmental group’s concept of risk assessment is principally pathway analysis and exposure assessment. This arbitrary division is not to suggest that engineers are not environmentalists and environmentalists do not include engineers, but is done only to provide a more convenient framework for discussing two different approaches to risk assessment and risk management.
Engineers and environmental groups had very different beginnings in the risk assessment and risk management field. The environmental group, for the most part, had its start with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cancer risk assessment guidelines in the mid-1970s and the National Academy of Science paradigm on risk assessment in 1983 (Barnes 1994). The engineering community, on the other hand, made its biggest jump into the risk assessment field in 1975 with the release of the reactor safety study (U.S. Nuclear Reg. Com. 1975). Even before the Reactor Safety Study, there was research going on to change our way of thinking 328about safety in general and nuclear safety in particular (Garrick 1968). Since this chapter is devoted to the nuclear power industry, the principles of risk assessment and risk management practiced follow those advocated by such investigators in the field as Rasmussen, Garrick, and Kaplan and as generally practiced in the engineering field.
