Does the safety report outline the principal features of the mathematical models used in the consequence analysis?
A safety report should include a brief description of the essential features and assumptions of the mathematical models used by the Operator to determine the consequences of major accidents. If the models are part of a well-known software package that has been well validated, then only the name of the software is required, but full details of the input should be provided. In-house models and any validation studies that have been carried out to support them should be described in detail. The main equations of a model should be given in an appendix if they have not been published elsewhere. The fact that an Operator has used a well-validated model to determine the consequences of an accident does not guarantee that the results are reliable. Assessors should recognise that the predictions of consequence analysis are more important than the means by which they were obtained. Assessors may feel that a safety report that fails to provide input data details for predictions, which appear optim
