Quantitative analysis of contributing factors to the resilience of emergency response organizations in nuclear power plants

Abstract

In the nuclear field, emergency response organizations are established upon the occurrence of events that have the potential to release radiation. These emergency response organizations consist of many sub-organizations such as the regulatory body, local government, hospitals, fire stations, and organizations of the nuclear utility such as an emergency operations facility and technical support center. While the reliability of emergency response organizations is crucial to reduce the radiation risk to the public in the case of an accident, no studies analyzing the impact of the various factors contributing to the resilience of the emergency response organizations have been conducted. This study aims to identify and quantitatively analyze the contributing factors to the resilience of emergency response organizations. For this purpose, previously reported contributing factors to resilience in several domains are first identified and then modified using expert judgments following the Delphi method. The relative importance of the contributing factors is then evaluated using the analytic hierarchy process. In this way, quantitative results are presented that can be used for determining the resilience of emergency response organizations in nuclear power plants. Limitations of this study are also discussed with ideas for future improvements.