Dear Colleagues,

It is with great pleasure that we announce the first US workshop on Open PSA to be hosted by the NEI, the Nuclear Energy Institute, in Washington, DC on October 3rd, 2007.

The Open PSA Initiative (www.open-psa.org) began this April. A group of concerned PSA analysts, researchers, software companies, and utilities began informal discussions with each other to see if we could realize the benefits which our discipline could bring to next generation PSA and the nuclear renaissance. These benefits include:

• Quality assurance of calculations;
• Less reliance on numerical approximations and truncation;
• Portability of the models between different software;
• Clarity of the models;
• Correct uncertainty and importance calculations;
• Assurance of model completeness;
• Enable specialized software to work with the same PRA model;
• Data and software backwards and forward compatibility;
• A universal format for industry data.

We gathered together at Kernkraftwerk Gösgen-Daeniken in Switzerland to hold our first workshop. It was a resounding success. Presentations were made concerning software, new PSA paradigms, problems with importance measures, to name a few. We also decided to create working groups in the following areas: data visualization, dynamic PSA, new models for human actions, integrated PSA documentation, new calculation techniques, and standard representation formats for PSA models and data.

The first working group meeting in standard representation formats for PSA models and data was held at EdF, Electricité de France, on July 19th, and a first draft of the standard was created.

The purpose of the US workshop is to present to the US audience some of the ideas and breakthroughs we have been discussing and to expand the participation in Open PSA to any and all PSA professionals who would like to create new ways of doing PSA. There are three more meetings scheduled for this year, In France, in Japan, and a final year-end meeting at the IAEA in Vienna to review the year’s work and formally create the Open PSA organization.

We hope to provide an open and transparent public forum to disseminate information, independently review new ideas, and spread the word. We want to emphasize an openness which will lead to methods and software with higher quality, lead to better understanding of PSA models, encourage peer review, and allow the transportability of models and methods.

We hope to bring to the international PSA community the benefits of an open initiative, and to bring together the different groups who engage in large scale PSA, in a non- competitive and commonly shared organization for the good of PSA; in this way, researchers, practitioners, corporations, and regulators can work together in open cooperation.

If you would like to join us, and we hope you will, please take time to fill out the attached Intention to Participate form and to register for the workshop on the EPRI home page (www.epri.com). There will be no cost for attendance, lunch will be served, and there will be a pre-workshop dinner provided gratis on October 2nd, the evening before the workshop.

Please feel free to post or to send this letter, the attached announcement, and the Intention to Participate form to anyone you feel might be interested. Spread the word.

Space will be limited, so please respond with all do speed. We hope to see you there.

The Open PSA Initiative