safety risk assessment Articles
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Should we follow the experts' advice? Epistemic uncertainty, consequence dominance and the knowledge asymmetry of safety
It is a common opinion in risk research that the public is irrational in its acceptance of risks. Many activities that are claimed by experts to be safe are not deemed to be safe by the public, and vice versa. The aim of this article is to put forward a normative critique against a common argument, viz. the claim that the public should follow the experts' advice in recommending an activity ...
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Health and safety risk assessment methodology to calculate reverse airflow tolerance in a biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) or airborne infection isolation room (AII) environment
A novel methodology is proposed to calculate how much air displacement and contaminant leakage might occur during a power outage that may result in a momentary positive pressure reversal in a BSL-3 facility. Note that the ultimate goal in design and operation of a BSL-3 facility is to achieve sustained directional airflow such that under failure conditions the airflow will not be reversed. The ...
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Editorial: Dealing with technical risks in a region
The ETH Polyproject on 'Risk and Safety of Technical Systems' took the initiative to research various aspects related to regional risk assessment and safety management. This Editorial asks, What is integrated area risk assessment and safety management? It briefly considers how to define a region and the objectives and scope for an integrated regional risk assessment and safety management (IRRASM) ...
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Implementing the precautionary principle: incorporating science, technology, fairness and accountability in environmental, health and safety decisions
The precautionary principle is in sharp political focus today because firstly the nature of scientific uncertainty is changing, and secondly there is increasing pressure to base governmental action on allegedly more "rational" schemes, such as cost-benefit analysis and quantitative risk assessment. The precautionary principle has been criticised as being both too vague and too arbitrary to form a ...
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Introducing layer of protection analysis for water safety risk assessments
In pursuing their mandate of providing good and safe drinking water, water system operators and asset owners work continuously towards developing and maintaining the trust and confidence of their customers. The goal of developing and maintaining customer trust has led to an increased emphasis in the water sector to explicitly assess and manage risks. In this paper, we introduce Layers of ...
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Risk assessment in mining industry
Mining is a hazardous operation and it involves considerable safety and health risk to the miners. Unsafe conditions in the surface and underground mines lead to a number of accidents/disasters, injury and loss to human lives. However, the hazards cannot be completely obliterated and thus there is need to define and reckon with an accident risk level possible to be presented in either ...
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Effectiveness of accident models: system theoretic model vs. the Swiss Cheese model: a case study of a US Coast Guard aviation mishap
Over the last several years, the US Coast Guard (CG) experienced an unusually high number of major aviation accidents. Following each major accident, the CG conducted mishap analysis board (MAB) - investigations based on the Swiss Cheese accident causality model. However, these investigations were not able to identify common contributing factors that may be causing systemic failures within the CG ...
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A review of layer of protection analysis techniques for oil and gas industry
The paper indicates advantages (and disadvantages) of layer of protection analysis (LOPA) over other methods to support its paramount position among different process safety analysis (PSA) methods in use today. Its simplicity (using order-of-magnitude estimates for all elements that constitute an accident scenario), universality (easy adaptation to particular needs), directness to indicate the ...
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Safety/risk assessment methodologies of deep geological facilities: results from a cross–national comparison
Any geological disposal/storage facility must prove its safe performance prior to licensing, regardless of whether the compound is solid radioactive waste (RW) or gaseous carbon dioxide (CO2). The disposal/storage facility is considered safe if it meets the relevant safety standards and proves its reliable safe performance over defined timescales. This paper presents a cross–national comparison ...
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Decision support for the management of aging nuclear critical infrastructures: vulnerability assessment and multi-criteria decision analysis
Because many nuclear facilities are nearing the end of their design life, it is important to assess the vulnerability of these aging critical infrastructure systems. The risks associated with nuclear energy are often complex and uncertain, including the release of radioactive fission and environmental issues related to the longevity and toxicity of waste products. In the event of a nuclear ...
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Managing uncertainty in health risk assessment
The process of risk (safety) assessment used to determine negligible-risk levels of human exposure to toxicants is subject to a number of sources of uncertainty. In addition to the common uncertainties related to high-to-low-dose extrapolation, interspecies extrapolation and intraspecies extrapolation, there can be uncertainty associated with extrapolation to alternative routes and durations of ...
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Increasing the Impact of Risk Assessment
Improve your risk management programs over time and increase employee safety by making risk assessment a living part of your organisation. By implementing a ‘living’ risk assessment cycle and developing a safety culture, you can: Manage risk more effectively Be better prepared for litigation Reduce overall risk This paper will identify a standard (but weak) risk assessment ...
By Cority
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A distributed multi-agent simulation system for the assessment of disaster management systems
In order to design effective disaster emergency management systems, a number of factors, including not only accident/disaster phenomena but also human behaviours such as coordination and communication between different organisations, should be considered in an integrated and comprehensive manner. In this paper, we propose the basic design of MASTERD: a Multi-Agent Simulation sysTem of Emergency ...
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The threat of piracy on maritime transportation
Recent acts of piracy in and about the Gulf of Aden undermine the safe passage of crude oil critical to global economies, serving as a force majeure for logistics service providers and supply chain managers to address this menace. In contrast to the raft of diplomatic and military responses to date, this note considers hitherto unexplored approaches to bypass threats of maritime piracy by ...
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An introduction to the Special Issue: An overview, history and context for the consideration of risk in the built environment
Especially since the terrorist attacks in the USA in 2001, the public has become much more enlightened regarding the trade-off of risk and security among choices of investment in communities. This introductory paper suggests that this is an important time to share the broader, comparative issues of structural safety with respect to risk assessment and management in the built environment, i.e. the ...
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Perception and acceptable risks – the union of decision-theory, behaviour and the brain
Acceptability and perception drive risky environmental heath and safety decisions: protecting against nearly infinitesimal risks can involve expenditures of millions or billions of dollars. Societal decision-makers and individual taxpayers are asked to understand numbers that span over more than 15 orders of magnitude, numbers with which most individuals lack experience. For example, we perceived ...
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Reliability data for modelling complex systems: some comments on data-handling in integrated regional risk assessment and safety management
Reliability data assessment may be a part of integrated regional risk assessment and safety management (IRRASM). This article considers the description and modelling of technical events within reliability analysis. Normally, problems arise in a practical approach, for example in the description of components and their failures, to warrant homogeneity of samples and to choose an adequate source of ...
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Target structural reliability in life cycle consideration
The concept of minimising life cycle cost can be rationally applied to determine a target reliability of structures. However, there has been a recent legal requirement to reduce CO2 emissions, therefore, the minimisation of life cycle CO2 emission could be an alternative approach in structural design. This paper explains the general formulae for deciding the optimum reliability by minimising the ...
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Review of pedestrian and evacuation simulations
Simulating emergency evacuations has grown in popularity since the tragic events of 9/11. Unfortunately there are a large number of modelling, simulation, animation and computer graphics systems available today many of which are misleading. Models and simulations fall into two main categories: Microscopic and Macroscopic. We highlight the general differences in these approaches, outlining the ...
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Determination and justification of the reference scenarios and associated source terms for emergency planning in Switzerland
For the purpose of planning emergency countermeasures in a nuclear accident, realistic reference scenarios were defined on the basis of general plant features. Three types of scenario cover the accident sequences expected to be the most probable. Time-scales and releases are identical for all Swiss Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs), although the plants differ in inventory, reactor type and age. The ...
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