Tatsuya Sakurahara

Tatsuya Sakurahara is currently a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering (NPRE). He is conducting research to advance science and applications of Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) by contributing to multiple collaborative studies including a National Science Foundation (NSF) project for big data analytics in PRA, a Department of Energy (DOE) Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) research for Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), a DOE NEUP project for advancing the PRA algorithm for the deployment of new technologies, an academia-industry project on Fire PRA with the South Texas Project Nuclear Operating Company (STPNOC) as part of the U.S. Industry Opportunities for Advanced Nuclear Technology Development Program under DOE, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) project for assessing pipe failure rates in advanced water-cooled reactors.  

Dr. Sakurahara received his Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Zahra Mohaghegh in NPRE at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His Ph.D. research developed an Integrated PRA (I-PRA) methodological framework for Fire PRA by coupling a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) fire model with a human performance model for manual suppression and integrating the fire-human coupling with the existing PRA model of nuclear power plants. For I-PRA, he also developed advanced techniques for uncertainty analysis, importance measure analysis, and the simulation-informed common cause failure modeling. Dr. Sakurahara holds an M.S. in Nuclear Engineering and Management and a B.S. in Environment and Energy System Engineering from the University of Tokyo, Japan.