Risk assessment: An introduction and critique

Risk assessment is a methodology which has been used to evaluate the safety of major public projects, notably aerospace programs, liquefied natural gas import facilities, and nuclear power plants. This article begins with a review of public attitudes toward risk and then describes the basic components of a risk assessment. Subsequent critical analysis suggests the pitfalls inherent in the technique, especially in regard to the establishing of a criterion of safety against which the results of a risk assessment will be compared. The author identifies three such criteria and rejects two of them, including the one most commonly used in federal government agency decision‐making, as unreliable or philosophically unacceptable. The article concludes with comments on the applicability of risk assessment in coastal zone management.