New Risks

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.