Frequency of exceedance any peak exceeding is . Its complement, is the probability of exceedance, the probability that has been exceeded at least once by time . This probability can be useful to estimate whether an extreme event will occur during a specified time period, such as the lifespan of a structure or the duration of an operation. If is small, for example for the frequency of a rare event occurring in a short time period, then Under this assumption, the frequency of exceedance is equal to the probability of exceedance per unit time, , and the probability of exceedance can be computed
Per cent mille because reactivity values tend to be small, so measuring in pcm allows reactivity to be expressed using whole numbers. Per cent mille A per cent mille or pcm is one one-thousandth of a percent. It can be thought of as a "milli-percent". It is commonly used in nuclear reactor engineering as a unit of reactivity. In nuclear reactor engineering, a per cent mille is equal to one-thousandth of a percent of the reactivity, denoted by Greek lowercase letter rho. Reactivity is a dimensionless unit representing a departure from criticality, calculated by: where k denotes the effective multiplication factor for the