The social structure of 70 years of literature on Human Reliability

From its first applications to the military domain, HRA progressed to applications in Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) operations, when development and validation of methods mainly targeted their use in Probabilistic Risk Assessments. In recent years, advances in HRA include the extension to various application fields, the development of new methods or enhancement of existing ones, data collection efforts, among others. These advances are possible due to the increasing number of authors on HRA and collaboration between them. Systematic literature reviews have been increasingly used for understanding various aspects of a research field. While recent reviews have provided an overview of the topics addressed by HRA research, the social structure of the field has not yet been fully explored. This paper discusses the social structure of HRA through 70 years of literature. The review aims at responding to how the links between different authors groups were created, that is, which large-scale projects, geographical proximity, or research topics contributed to these connections. The results indicate that (1) while the research on HRA was mostly based in the U.S.A. before 2000, China, Japan, and South Korea are significant contributors to the recent literature; (2) despite the increasing diversity of application fields, such as applications to the maritime and offshore industry, the main focus on NPPs operations is persistent since the 1980s; (3) due to large research projects, favored by a connected world, the physical workspace does not limit current collaboration among authors.

Reproductive genetics, risk, and context

This chapter uses the example of consanguineous marriages to illustrate how risk for offspring with genetic disease has become a focal concern in the governance of the health of populations, and to explore some local responses to the scientific discourse of genetic risk in cousin marriages. It first outlines the principles of Mendelian genetics that underpin clinical assessments of risk for single gene conditions as backdrop for the analysis of divergences between scientific and local understandings of genetic risk. It considers similarities and differences between public and policy discourses about the health risks of consanguineous marriage in Europe, where such marriages are rare, and in the Middle East, where such marriages are more common. In Europe, the issue is bound into discourses concerning the non-integration of immigrant-origin minorities; across the Gulf States, consanguineous marriage seems to have become a proxy for genetic risk, its identification and management associated with modernity. It then explores some consistent disconnects between scientific understandings of causality and risk for recessive disease across these contexts. It notes, locally, the common invocation of environmental and spiritual factors and the equation of genes with blood, the influence of patrilineal kinship, and the ambiguities of the concept of being a ‘carrier’ and of probabilistic risk assessments. The chapter shows how scientific and local ideas about risk perception and management evolve alongside and relation to one other, sometimes with clinically significant consequences for families and for health services.

MELCOR Demonstration Analysis of Accident Scenarios at a Spent Nuclear Reprocessing Plant

The work presented in this paper applies the MELCOR code developed at Sandia National Laboratories to evaluate the source terms from potential accidents in non-reactor nuclear facilities. The present approach provides an integrated source term approach that would be well-suited for uncertainty analysis and probabilistic risk assessments. MELCOR is used to predict the thermal-hydraulic conditions during fires or explosions that includes a release of radionuclides. The radionuclides are tracked throughout the facility from the initiating event to predict the time-dependent source term to the environment for subsequent dose or consequence evaluations. In this paper, we discuss the MELCOR input model development and the evaluation of the potential source terms from the dominated fire and explosion scenarios for a spent fuel nuclear reprocessing plant.