Research Student

Academic Division: Energy, Fluids and Turbomachinery

Research group: Energy

Email: amld4@cam.ac.uk

Research interests

There is scepticism about the accuracy of Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) in capturing the safety of complex systems. Quantifying safety probabilistically not only misrepresents human, software and systemic hazards, but probabilistic numbers can also be misleading, giving an impression of false precision. Moreover, PRA fails to account for the risk of component interaction accidents and the complexities of non-linear event causality.

System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) is a system safety analysis method. It represents a paradigm shift in evaluating safety, focusing on the systematic control of hazards rather than the identification and mitigation of linear causal event sequences, thereby addressing the limitations of PRA. Additionally, its focus on control structures has been shown to identify low-cost, highly effective, and easily implementable safety measures. This method is particularly well suited to advanced reactor designs, as it is technology agnostic. New designs often lack the reliability data required for PRAs, whereas STPA produces system-specific safety requirements.

However, questions remain about how the method could comply with regulatory frameworks, since it lacks numerical outputs that can be compared against quantitative safety targets, and given that it is used more as a design tool than a licensing tool.

My research examines the applicability of this approach to advanced nuclear designs and investigates how it can comply with regulatory frameworks for licensing.

Other positions

Homerton College member

Department role and responsibilities