Seminar Invite: PRA and Risk-Informed Decision Making at the NRC: Some Trends and Challenges

The B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences cordially invites you to attend Dr. Nathan Siu’s seminar on “PRA and Risk-Informed Decision Making at the NRC: Some Trends and Challenges.” The seminar will take place on February 21, 2020 from 1-2pm at UCLA in Engineering V Building Room 5101.

Biography:  Dr. Nathan Siu is a Senior Technical Adviser for Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) in the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research.  His current duties include providing PRA-related advice and support on a broad range of topics, including research and development regarding PRA methods, models, tools, and data. Prior to joining NRC in 1997, he was on the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory staff, the Nuclear Engineering Department faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the staff of Pickard, Lowe, and Garrick, Inc. He received his B.S. (Energy Conversion and Utilization), M.S. (Nuclear Science and Engineering), and Ph.D. (Nuclear Science and Engineering) from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Abstract: The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is in the midst of a transformation aimed at ensuring that the agency can continue to fulfill its regulatory mission efficiently and effectively in the face of external and internal trends. A major aspect of this transformation involves the increased and improved use of risk information in the NRC’s regulatory processes. This talk provides an overview of NRC’s use of risk information, discusses a number of trends pushing the NRC in its current direction, and explores a particular challenge in addressing these trends: the treatment of uncertainty in probabilistic risk assessment and risk-informed decision making.