Since 1983, Woody Epstein was a probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) consultant, manager, mathematician, and technical advisor for large organizations, both public and private. Since 2011, he acted as the Manager of Risk Consulting, for Lloyd’s Register Consulting, Japan; from 2001 – 2011, he was the Operations Manager and Manager of Risk Consulting for ABS Consulting, Japan.
He has been a team member in over 20 nuclear power station risk assessments worldwide.
Woody started working in Japan in 2001 and secured the Abandoned Chemical Weapons (ACW) PRA and served as the project technical manager. The 4 year project was done for the Japanese Prime Minister’s Office. In 2009, he secured the Preliminary Safety Assessment project to analyze Mitsubishi’s new regional jet (MRJ) type certification, serving as project manager.
In March, 2011, Tokyo Institute of Technology invited Woody to be a visiting scientist at Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he authored an independent evaluation of the accident at Fukushima Daiichi for the Ninokata Laboratory, “A PRA Practioner looks at the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami”
In August, 2012, he was the operations manager for the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Mission to the Onagawa NPS, to do a damage walk down of the station after the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake..
From March, 2013 until his death, Woody was the project manager for the active faults studies for the Japan Atomic Power Company and the Tohoku Electric Power Company at the Tsuruga and Higashidori NPPs.
In August, 2013, he served as the operations manager for the United Nations Scientific Committee for the Effects of Radiation Mission to Fukushima Prefecture to listen to and film the Fukushima people.
In February, 2014, Woody was a member of the US delegation to the first US-Japan PRA Roundtable sponsored by the US Department of Energy and the Japan Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry.
He was one of the founders of the Open PSA Initiative, is a Core Group Member of the Resilience Engineering Group, member of the Japan Nuclear Safety Institute’s Technical Review Committee for PRA and Seismic PRA, and is a member of the Risk Technical Committee of the Atomic Energy Society of Japan.