The Foundation was set-up in 1998. It grew from conversations between its founder members about the MORT programme and risk management. Between 1968 and 2002, the Management Oversight and Risk Tree programme (MORT) was part of the effort to manage risks to environment, safety and health (ES&H) in the US nuclear industry. The Board members of NRI were interested in MORT because it treated risk management as a conceptual whole. They were also inspired by the intellectual generosity of the MORT programme. Mindful that informed advice about MORT was scarce and the existing public domain materials were "pre-Google", the Board members thought they should do something. This is why the NRI Foundation makes sure that people can find MORT materials via the internet.

The Foundation tries to emulate the thinking behind the original MORT materials. The authors of MORT borrowed heavily from areas outside of EH&S to supplement the practices available in that field in the late 1960s. These 'borrowings' started by recognising the similarity between problems in the EH&S domain and problems elsewhere - learning by analogy. The authors did field research to see if the analogies held true, whether the solutions to problems in one domain could work effectively in EH&S. This meant that the solutions included in MORT had some level of proof and had some explicit theoretical basis. The Foundation makes use of the virtuous circle that connects tools and concepts. The NRI Foundation makes tools, because tools are helpful. But making tools also makes it clearer what concepts are relevant.

Sharing knowledge is built into the MORT tradition. The MORT project was contractually obliged to put everything into the public domain. It's only fair to mention that its workers were glad to do so. NRI emulates this by making tools and papers available via this web site and by encouraging organisations to share their knowledge.