Assessing Accident Risks of Energy Technologies and Energy Infrastructure Networks Disruption and Recovery Processes

Today’s societies and economies depend heavily on reliable supply of energy. In the past decades, a number of catastrophic events triggered by natural hazards, technical failures or intentional attacks have influenced the entire energy-related business. Consequently, analyzing such events has become a high priority for several stakeholders engaged in the safe and secure provision of energy. Since zero risk does not exist, meaning that adverse events could always occur, resilience is a promising concept to plan and build reliable energy systems. A systematic, in-depth, literature review on resilience assessment of energy infrastructure was conducted for the purpose of this thesis in order to identify the main trends and gaps. The findings show that the overarching goals of most of the existing resilience frameworks are twofold, namely to contribute to the prevention and minimization of adverse consequences, and to support a quick recovery after a disruption. The Future Resilient Systems (FRS) program builds on a resilience framework comprising enabling, cognitive and biophysical functions. This thesis addresses the biophysical functions involving the disruption and the recovery. Disruptive events, such as accidents, have been investigated using historical accident information. This requires, however, the availability of comprehensive and up-to-date data. Therefore, the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) established in the late 1990s the ENergy-related Severe Accident Database (ENSAD) that since then has been continuously updated. A key challenge is how to efficiently and comprehensively keep the database up to date, considering the vast and continuously growing amount of information that is especially available from full-text news archives and other unstructured data sources. This doctoral thesis presents and applies a novel procedure to systematically collect information in a semi-automated manner from a multitude of primary sources. The results demonstrate that the developed procedure outperforms earlier attempts of ...