Chemicals risk assessment Safety

Winter, C.K. (2003). Exposure and dose-response modeling for food chemical risk assessment, in Schmidt, R.H. and Rodrick, G.E., eds.. Food Safety Handbook, Wiley-Interscience, Hoboken, pp. 73-88. 

Chemical risk assessments are carried out by many national and international bodies, including major actors such as the World Health Organization (WHO) - particularly the International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS), the OECD, the Unites States, and the European Union (EU). The efforts undertaken by these major acting bodies in terms of chemical risk assessments are reflected in this book. 

A Chemical Safety Report that documents chemical risk assessments must be prepared for substances that a company manufactures or imports at >10 tonnes per year. If a substance is identified as dangerous or very persistent and very bioaccumulative (VPVB), a set of exposure scenarios detailing the relevant risk management measures necessary to reduce exposures must be attached as an Annex to existing Safety Data Sheets. 

Chemical Safety, Chemical Risk Assessment, Geneva, World Health Organisation 1999. 

IPCS (2007). Draft guidance on mutagenicity testing for chemical risk assessment open fo" comment. The International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS), http //www.who.int/ipcs/methods/... 

For nongenotoxic chemicals, risk assessment is based on the concept of threshold doses, below which no adverse effect results from exposure. From human or experimental animal data, one tries to establish the no observable adverse effect level (NOAEL) and the lowest observed adverse effect level (LOAEL). In order to establish safe levels of exposure to potentially toxic agents, the NOAEL is divided by a safety factor (often named uncertainty factor). When the risk assessment is based on data from experimental animals, a default safety factor of 100 is usually applied. The safety factor constitutes a factor of 10 for potential differences in susceptibility between animals and man, and another factor of 10 for interindividual differences among humans. The factors are combinations of differences in toxicokinetics and toxicodynamics, both in animals and man. If true factors are known, the size of the safety factor may be changed accordingly. When risk assessment is based on human data, a safety factor of 10 is applied in most cases, for instance, for food additives. However, for natural toxins in food, smaller factors are usually applied. This is a risk management decision, often based on information on the absence of adverse health effects at intake levels close to the estimated LOAELs. 

This section is an introduction to key machinery requirements according to EN 60204-1 and other related standards. Other requirements and standards may apply, including, but not limited to, risk assessment, safety circuits and components, guarding, electrical, mechanical, radiation, chemicals, gases, documentation, and testing. 

ALOHA User s Manual. US. Environmental Protection Agency. 2007. National Safety Council, Washington. Amendola, A., Contini, S., Ziomas, I. 1992. Uncertainties in chemical risk assessment Results of a European benchmark exercise. Journal of Hazardous Materials 29(3) 347-363. 

Alternatives have been suggested to the traditional, but arbitrarily set safety factors. Species-specihc allometric scaling factors have been proposed to account for differences in toxicokinetics between animal and human species (Falk-Filipsson et al. 2007). Other uncertainties include a lack of data showing the extent of interindividual sensitivity in humans (genetic polymorphisms), or individual sensitivity and susceptibility to chronic diseases. Because of these uncertainties, use of chemical or effect-specihc factors in chemical risk assessment has been suggested as a more appropriate approach resulting in higher conhdence of sufficient protection (Martin et al. 2013). 

The purpose of hazard analysis and risk assessment ia the chemical process industry is to (/) characterize the hazards associated with a chemical facihty (2) determine how these hazards can result in an accident, and (J) determine the risk, ie, the probabiUty and the consequence of these hazards. The complete procedure is shown in Figure 1 (see also Industrial hygiene Plant safety). 

CCPS G-51. 1998. Understanding Quantitative Risk Assessment. American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Center for Chemical Process Safety, New York. 

Transportation should be considered when assessing risks associated with planned or existing plants. The design of new chemical processing units should include at the earliest opportunity a qualitative or quantitative risk assessment of the whole system including production, use, and transportation in order to minimize overall risk. A brief discussion of the inherent safety aspects of transportation is included in Chapter 5. 

I am a physicist who switched to nuclear engineering for my Ph D. My introduction to PSA was as an original participant in the Reactor Safety Study in 1972. Material for this book was first gathered in 1974 for a workshop on what to expect in WASH-1400 (the results of the Reactor Safety Study). Materials were gathered over the years for EPRI, Savannah River Laboratory, and other workshops. A culmination was in 1988 with "Probabilistic Risk Assessment in the Nuclear Power Industry" with Robert Hall as coauthor. This book updates these materials and adds material on PSA in the chemical process industry. I prepared the material for printing using a word processor... 

Banks, W., Wells, J. E. (1992). A Probabilistic Risk Assessment Using Human Reliability Analysis Methods. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Hazard Identification and Risk Analysis, Human Factors, and Human Reliability in Process Safety. New York American Institute of Chemical Engineers, CCPS. 

The Rijnmond area is that part of the Rhine delta between Rotterdam and the North Sea. The Commission for the Safety of the Population at large (COVO) commissioned the study for six chemicals and the operations associated with them acrylonitrile, liquid ammonia, liquid chlorine, LNG, propylene, and part of a separation process (diethanolamine stripper of a hydrodesulfurizer). The study objectives were to evaluate methods of risk assessment and obtain experience with practical applications of these methods. The results were to be used to decide to what extent such methods can be used in formulating safety policy. The study was not concerned with the acceptability of risk or the acceptability of risk reducing measures. 

Concise International Chemical Assessment Documents (CICADs) are published by the International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS) — a cooperative programme of the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Labour Organization (ILO), and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). CICADs have been developed from the Environmental Health Criteria documents (EHCs), more than 200 of which have been published since 1976 as authoritative documents on the risk assessment of chemicals. 

The sheer complexity of environmental mixtnres of EDCs, possible interactive effects, and capacity of some EDCs to bioaccumulate (e.g., in fish, steroidal estrogens and alkylphenolic chemicals have been shown to be concentrated up to 40,000-fold in the bile [Larsson et al. 1999 Gibson et al. 2005]) raises questions about the adequacy of the risk assessment process and safety margins established for EDCs. There is little question that considerable further work is needed to generate a realistic pictnre of the mixture effects and exposure threats of EDCs to wildlife populations than has been derived from studies on individual EDCs. Further discussion of the toxicity of mixtures will be found in Chapter 2, Section 2.6. 

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