Hazards preventive mechanisms, assessment

The health assessment is a mechanism to respond to community health concerns associated with human exposure to hazardous substances at a site. It has three major purposes (1) evaluating the public health implications of the site (2) addressing those implications by developing health advisories or making recommendations, including further health or environmental studies and (3) identifying populations where actions are necessary to mitigate or prevent adverse health effects. 

A useful resource related to carcinogenicity, includes a wide array of publications from the Carcinogenic Potency Project. The references include papers on methodological analysis of the relevance of carcinogenicity prediction from bioassays, species comparisons, target organs, mechanism of carcinogenesis, risk assessment techniques, possible cancer hazards of natural and synthetic chemicals, and causes and prevention of cancer. 

The Safety Case produced for the Windscale Vitrification Plant in 1994 included a detailed and comprehensive assessment of fault conditions in the plant using HAZOP and Probabilistic Risk Assessment techniques. The Safety Case identified a number of major hazards. These major hazards, along with the protective measures, Operating Rules, and Safety Mechanisms designed to prevent these hazards or to mitigate them are briefly described below. 

In addition to the methods described above, seismic qualification of items in seismic category 2 should be carried out by means of dedicated expert walkdown, in which all potential interaction mechanisms should be evaluated mechanical interaction or interaction by the release of hazardous substances, fire and flood (earthquake induced), and the prevention of safety related operator action through the impairment of access. In this sense, such walkdown methods could be considered part of the design assessment see Ref. [9] for their planning. 

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