Characterization, propagation and analysis of aleatory and epistemic uncertainty in the 2008 performance assessment for the proposed repository for high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada

Abstract

The 2008 performance assessment (PA) for the proposed repository for high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain (YM), Nevada, illustrates the conceptual structure of risk assessments for complex systems. The 2008 YM PA is based on the following three conceptual entities:a probability space that characterizes aleatory uncertainty; a function that predicts consequences for individual elements of the sample space for aleatory uncertainty; and a probability space that characterizes epistemic uncertainty. These entities and their use in the characterization, propagation and analysis of aleatory and epistemic uncertainty are described and illustrated with results from the 2008 YM PA. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.