This volume contains the proceedings of the 1986 annual meeting and
conference of the Society for Risk Analysis. It provides a detailed view
of both mature disciplines and emerging areas within the fields of
health, safety, and environmental risk analysis as they existed in 1986.
In selecting and organizing topics for this conference, we sought both
(i) to identify and include new ideas and application areas that would
be of lasting interest to risk analysts and to users of risk analysis
results, and (ii) to include innovative methods and applications in
established areas of risk analysis. In the three years since the
conference, many of the topics presented there for the first time to a
broad risk analysis audience have become well developed-and sometimes
hotly debated-areas of applied risk research. Several, such as the
public health hazards from indoor air pollutants, radon in the home,
high-voltage electric fields, and the AIDS epidemic, have been the
subjects of headlines since 1986. Older areas, such as hazardous waste
site ranking and remediation, air emissions dispersion modeling and
exposure assessment, transportation safety, seismic and nuclear risk
assessment, and occupational safety in the chemical industry, have
continued to receive new treatments and to benefit from advances in
quantitative risk assessment methods, as documented in the theoretical
and methodological papers in this volume. A theme of the meeting was the
importance of new technologies and the new and uncertain risks that they
create.
