04 · Nuclear Energy Risks
Learning from every event: nuclear safety, quantified
Albatrisk hosts and continues the nuclear-risk research programme of the ETH Zurich Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks — including the ETHZ Curated Nuclear Events Database, now available to researchers, operators and regulators worldwide.
Objectives
Answering the big-picture questions about nuclear safety and risk
The programme’s top objective is to answer “big picture” questions about safety and risk, as well as new technologies and opportunities in nuclear energy — and to provide sound, unbiased risk information on this crucial issue.
Trends, fleets and designs
Quantifying safety improvement over time and the differences between reactor fleets and designs, including the accident externality.
Learning from operating experience
The IAEA has cited a “lost learning opportunity” due to the lack of analysis of low-level events and near accidents. The repetition of similar errors over time — fore-runners — shows this. We support intensified learning from experienced incidents.
Generic PSA research and development
Simplified and harmonised probabilistic safety assessment models that make precursor analysis applicable across plants and countries.
Integrative energy portfolios
An integrative approach to energy portfolios accounting for constraints from physics, thermodynamics, engineering (in particular the grid), demographics and economics.
Philosophy
Learning from all relevant experience
Learning from all relevant experience, and exploiting all relevant means, is important. Methods should be optimised to answer the top objective, not the other way round.
Experience can be pooled to draw broad conclusions. Views about what constitutes “relevant experience” are often myopic — the snowflake fallacy: “all units are incomparably different from others, as well as from themselves over time.”
Means
Analysis of accident precursors
Measuring near-miss risk significance regardless of ultimate outcome — binary outcome measures are not enough.
Simplified and harmonised PSA models
A standard, efficiently applicable technique for the approximate risk assessment of events, enabling international precursor analysis.
Continued development of event data
The curated events database is a living work in progress: expert-reviewed descriptions, annotations including INES scores, references and failure sequences.
The ETHZ Curated Nuclear Events Database
Seventy-five years of civil nuclear operating experience, curated
Expert-reviewed event descriptions, annotations including INES scores, failure sequences, contributing factors and references — with an Excel access tool for filtering, statistics and export.
curated events with safety significance
period covered
countries
fields per event, incl. failure sequences and cost estimates
Publications
Reference publications
Ali Ayoub, Andrej Stankovski, Wolfgang Kröger and Didier Sornette
The ETH Zurich Curated Nuclear Events Database: Layout, Event Classification, and Analysis of Contributing Factors
Reliability Engineering and System Safety 213, 107781 (2021)
Ali Ayoub, Andrej Stankovski, Wolfgang Kröger and Didier Sornette
Precursors and startling lessons: Statistical analysis of 1250 events with safety significance from the civil nuclear sector
Reliability Engineering and System Safety 214, 107820 (2021)
Team
The research team
The database and the associated publications were developed at the ETH Zurich Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks by the following team.
Prof. Didier Sornette
Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks, ETH Zurich (emeritus) · Risk Research Director, Albatrisk
Prof. Wolfgang Kröger
Professor emeritus, ETH Zurich · nuclear safety and risk analysis
Dr. Spencer Wheatley
Statistical analysis of nuclear incidents and accidents, open events database
Dr. Ali Ayoub
Curated events database, precursor analysis and generic PSA framework (PhD, ETH Zurich, 2021)
Andrej Stankovski
Database enhancement, access tool and user manual (ETH Zurich, 2020)