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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The RAIN scale: A good intention that falls short
Radiation protection specialists agree that clear communication of radiation risks remains a vexing challenge that cannot be solved solely by finding new ways to convey technical information.
Earlier this year, an article in Nuclear News described a new radiation risk communication tool, known as the Radiation Index, or, RAIN (“Let it RAIN: A new approach to radiation communication,” NN, Jan. 2025, p. 36). The authors of the article created the RAIN scale to improve radiation risk communication to the general public who are not well-versed in important aspects of radiation exposures, including radiation dose quantities, units, and values; associated health consequences; and the benefits derived from radiation exposures.
Oliver S. Wang, Garill A. Coles, John E. Kelly, Thomas B. Powers, Thomas E. Rainey, Michael D. Zentner, Gregory D. Wyss, David M. Kunsman, LeAnn Adams Miller, Timothy A. Wheeler, Jeremy L. Sprung, Allen L. Camp
Nuclear Technology | Volume 96 | Number 2 | November 1991 | Pages 147-168
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT91-A34601
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the late 1980s, a level III probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) was performed for the N Reactor, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) production reactor located on the Hanford site in Washington State. The PRA objectives were to assess the risks to the public and to the Hanford on-site workers posed by the operation of the N Reactor, to compare those risks to proposed DOE nuclear safety guidelines, and to identify risk-reduction changes to the plant. State-of-the-art methodology was employed based largely on the methods developed by Sandia National Laboratories for the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in support of the NUREG-1150 study of five commercial nuclear power plants. The structure of the probabilistic models allowed complex interactions and dependencies between systems to be explicitly considered. Latin hypercube sampling techniques were used to develop uncertainty distributions for the risks associated with postulated core damage events initiated by fire, seismic, and internal events as well as the overall combined risk. The risk results show that the N Reactor meets the proposed DOE nuclear safety guidelines and compares favorably to the commercial nuclear power plants considered in the NUREG-1150 analysis.