Frank Reginald Farmer

OBE The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established o ...

, FRS, (18 December 1914 – 10 June 2001) was a British nuclear regulator (working for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority's Safety and Reliability Directorate, SRD) and later an academic at Imperial College London.

Accomplishments

*He considered the public acceptability of risk, (e.g. from

nuclear reactors A nuclear reactor is a device used to initiate and control a fission nuclear chain reaction or nuclear fusion reactions. Nuclear reactors are used at nuclear power plants for electricity generation and in nuclear marine propulsion. Heat from nu ...

), arguing that a whole spectrum of events needs to be considered - not just the Maximum Credible Accident, but also those of less consequence but which were much more probable. *He used examples such as hill walking to define a spectrum of risks which people found acceptable. *He embodied this in a variation of (Acceptable Risk Frequency/Event Probability) with (Consequence), which is usually called the Farmer Curve. *Farmer postulated a near-inverse variation as acceptable - thus events which have twice the consequence must be approximately half as frequent, or less. The Farmer Curve is usually plotted as a straight line in log-log co-ordinates. He was made an

in 1967 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1981.

References

typical Farmer Paper 1914 births 2001 deaths Academics of Imperial College London Members of the Order of the British Empire Fellows of the Royal Society {{UK-academic-bio-stub