7. Developments at the beginning of the 21st century

A first development in safety analysis practices is the growing complexity of the expert assessments carried out by both operators and safety organizations. This is largely the result of the strategic importance of achieving good performance, including economic performance, from French nuclear facilities, of taking into account the lessons learned from experience feedback and the results of research carried out over several decades and continuing today, and of setting safety objectives that have become – and it's normal – progressively more ambitious.

Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, it might have been considered sufficient to assess certain aspects of plant safety on the basis of good industrial practice and the reasoning of experienced engineers, taking arbitrary margins to cover uncertainties, a major trend, made possible by the development of increasingly high-performance...