CRA guest lectures on PSA at Imperial College

On the 10th December 2010, CRA managing director Jasbir Sidhu and consultant Hugh Stephenson presented a guest lecture at Imperial College London.  The lecture provided an overview of Probabilistic Safety Analysis (PSA) to a group of approximately 90 undergraduate and postgraduate engineering students.  The interactive lecture covered a wide range of topics including an outline of key PSA elements, the concepts involved in fault tree and event tree modelling, data mining and analysis, interpretation of results, and benefits and limitations of PSA analyses. The lecture concluded by providing examples of how PSA can be used to support station activities and risk inform safety case development. The lecture was well received by the students and was followed by an enthusiastic Q&A session.

Hugh, who was once a graduate only 5 years ago, felt that the guest lecture was a great success, introducing the students into a specialised area of nuclear engineering.  Jasbir saw the lecture further strengthening CRA’s already well established connection with Imperial College.

Dr Simon Walker who is the head of the Nuclear Research Group at Imperial College said:

“We really value having outside experts come to address our classes. The lecture from CRA was absolutely what we hope for, giving as it did a real 'hands on' view of the subject, in a real world context.”