An Approach to Risk Assessment for Canadian Urnarium Mill Trailings

Abstract

Quantitative risk analysis provides a framework for combining the consequences of sequences of events (scenarios) in proportion to their likelihoods of occurrence, This paper considers risk as a "set of triplets" consisting of: scenarios, the likelihoods of scenarios occurring and their consequences, should they occur. Both the likelihood of an event (or scenario) occurring, and its consequence may be uncertain quantities, The risk quantification method presented allows one to incorporate these uncertainties. This paper discusses the concept of risk and demonstrates how the consequences of a number of scenarios involving naturally occurring events can be combined to estimate the overall risk arising from uranium mill tailings.