Timothy S. Margulies
Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD 21218
Risk-based prioritization and decision making has been implemented by the U. S. EPA in several areas to assure quality and consistency of risk and environmental assessment and to identify areas to reduce uncertainty. This talk will review the elements of risk assessment and risk management and will compare the paradigms for considering primarily ionizing radiation and mechanical radiation to assess existing and projected risks to human health and the environment. Treatment of uncertainty propagation in model parameters, such as latin hypercube Monte Carlo sampling and by adjoint methods, as well as decision-making approaches including statistical hypothesis testing will be discussed for comparing alternatives to control unwanted sounds.