At Sandia National Laboratories we use risk management as a vital part of many projects. Our development of risk-management techniques began decades ago during our safety studies for nuclear weapons. We extended those techniques greatly in the 1970s when we developed methods for probabilistic risk assessment and applied them to studies of nuclear-reactor safety. Beginning with those two foundations, we gained expertise that we now apply to projects spanning a wide range of technical disciplines and applications. The fact sheets collected in this folder describe many of the Sandia projects that use the techniques of risk management.


To help readers find the descriptions that are of most interest to them, these fact sheets are grouped into eight categories. Although all the descriptions are brief, we hope that they convey a sense of Sandia's experience in applying risk-management techniques and of the usefulness of those techniques. Each sheet contains the name, address, and telephone number of a Sandian who will be pleased to supply additional information. The eight categories are:

• Environment and Environmental Restoration
  
• Information Systems
  
• Nuclear Reactors
  
• Physical Security
  
• Production and Manufacturing
  
• Transportation
  
• Waste Management
  
• Weapons
  

The phrase "risk management" has a broad definition at Sandia. Risk management may encompass as many as five different, but closely related, activities:

1. Identification of the hazards associated with a technical system or with potential solutions to a technical or nontechnical problem.
   
   
2. Determination of the risks (i.e., the consequences and likelihoods) of those hazards.

3. Reduction of the risks to acceptable levels through appropriate design and control measures.

4. Thorough documentation of activities 1 through 3.

5. Continuing reevaluation (reiteration of steps 1 through 4)in order to improve the system or solution.

Under these broad definitions, risk management is an important management tool. At Sandia we find it useful in making many kinds of decisions, both technical and nontechnical, in addition to its original use in safety studies. It is useful even when not carried out through all five of the stages listed above. For example, the first two stages (collectively called "risk assessment") are often valuable by themselves because identification of likelihoods is helpful in the explicit treatment of uncertainties during decision making. Examples of such activities are included in the fact sheets in this collection. The last three stages, combined with formal decision-analysis techniques, can provide a framework for the detailed decision making and record keeping that many current projects require. Among the projects described in these fact sheets are several that encompass all five stages.

Several hundred Sandia staff members, plus a number of student interns and foreign nationals, work to solve risk-related problems in these eight areas. To realize the benefits of interactions among these programs and to encourage interactions between our programs and those at other institutions, we have formed Sandia's International Institute for Systematic Risk Studies (SIISRS).

SIISRS ("scissors") is an affiliation of risk professionals at Sandia National Laboratories, working in partnership with Associates of the Institute to

• find comprehensive solutions to problems presented by high-risk systems
  
• apply risk methods to a broad spectrum of problems of national and international significance
  
• develop new tools and methods for risk assessment, risk communication, and risk management
  
• provide educational opportunities at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral levels in risk-related fields

Thomas E. Blejwas, Director
Sandia National Laboratories, MS-0736
P.O. Box 5800, Albuquerque, NM 87185-0736

Phone: (505) 844-0577
email: teblejw@sandia.gov

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