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practices advocated by the project. In some of the Russian projects, the state-of-the art risk management practices may not be available for all development. The risk assessment can be run using proposed construction
and operation practices, and run using state-of-the-art practices, and determine the environmental risk using both scenarios.
By contrast the U.S. risk assessment is used to make decisions about whether
a project should move forward, and whether more (or less) environmental safeguards should be developed for the proposed project. The U.S. designs environmental safeguards upfront in a project, and charges against a project for subsequent
environmental damage, if any, are evaluated after the fact of that damage, independent of the original risk assessment.
In some settings, such as Superfund,
a risk assessment might form the basis for requiring the posting of a bond against the
chance of a future accident, but that bond could be released at the end of a specified period of time if the accident did not materialize, and the bond would not indemnify the project against later judgments if the cost of an actual accident exceeded the amount of the bond. While risk assessments may provide a rationale
for planning risk management, in the US system, the risk assessments often focus on plausible worst cases rather than taking the full effect of extensive risk management into account.
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