Abstract
Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) has refined a process for developing inherently safer system designs based on methods used by Sandia to design detonation safety into nuclear weapons. The process was created when Sandia realized that standard engineering practices did not provide the level of safety assurance necessary for nuclear weapon operations, with their potential for catastrophic accidents. A systematic approach, which relies on mutually supportive design principles integrated through fundamental physical principles, was developed to ensure a predictably safe system response under a variety of operational and accidentβbased stesses. Robust, safe system designs result from this thematic approach to safety, minimizing the number of safety critical features. This safety assurance process has two profound benefits: the process avoids the need to understand or limit the ultimate intensity of offβnormal environments and it avoids the requirement to analyze and test a large array of accident environment scenarios (e.g., directional threats, sequencing of environments, time races, etc) to demonstrate conformance to all safety requirements.