Traditional Safety Philosophies

Old safety philosophy assumes that at any given time workers make a choice to work safe or not, whereas modem safety thinking assumes that accidents are defects in the total system and that people are only a part of the system. 

The method for safety improvement, according to antiquated safety philosophy, is to persuade and appeal to workers to be safer, whereas modem safety thinking is that methods for improvement involve identifying appropriate ways to improve the system. 

Outdated safety philosophy assumes that accidents are the woiker s fault. Modem safety philosophy assumes that there are multiple causes for accidents, and that the root causes and the reason behind the behavior should be sought and rectified. 

Number of reported near-miss incidents corrected 

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The philosophy of reactor control azid safety In the Hanford reactors had its origin In the days of the Manhattan Project. The original philosophy has satisfactorily stood the test of time and has carried on through the years with few changes. It was only natural then that the Initial thoughts with respect to reactor control and safety for the HPR followed closely the traditional Hanford philosophy. 

Having described the underlying philosophy of the traditional approach to accident prevention, we shall now discuss some of the specific methods that are used to implement it, namely motivational campaigns and disciplinary action and consider the evidence for their success. We shall also discuss another frequently employed strategy, the use of safety audits. 

The Hydrocarbon Processing Industry (HPI), has traditionally been reluctant to invest capital where an immediate direct return on the investment to the company is not obvious, as would any business enterprise. Additionally financial fire losses in the petroleum and related industries were relatively small up to about the 1950 s. This was due to the small size of facilities and the relatively low value of oil and gas to the volume of production. Until 1950, a fire or explosion loss of more than 5 million U. S. Dollars had not occurred in the refining industry in the USA. Also in this period, the capital intensive offshore oil exploration and production industry were only just beginning. The use of gas was also limited early in the century. Consequentially its value was also very low. Typically production gas was immediately flared or the well was capped and considered as an uneconomical reservoir. Since gas development was limited, large vapor explosions were relatively rare and catastrophic destruction from petroleum incidents was essentially unheard of. The outlays for petroleum industry safety features were traditionally the absolute minimum required by governmental regulations. The development of loss prevention philosophies and practices were therefore not effectively developed within the industry. 

The philosophy of process intensification has been traditionally characterized by four words smaller, cheaper, safer, slicker. And indeed, equipment size, land use costs, and process safety are among the most important PI incentives. But process intensification can (and should) also be placed in a broader context—the context of sustainable technological development. Several years ago DSM published a picture symbolizing its own vision of process intensification (32), in which skyscraping distillation towers of the naphtha-cracking unit are replaced by a compact, clean, and tidy indoor plant (see Figure 3). The importance of PI for sustainable development and its role in the company s responsible business has been further stressed in a recent publication by the company s CEO, Peter Elverding (33). Here,... 

Thus, IRIS has adopted the internal CRDMs as reference (traditional CRDMs remaining as backup) because (1) they eliminate the corrosion problem, (2) they are one more implementation of the safety-by-design IRIS philosophy, and (3) current advancements which have occurred in Japan in regard to the electromagnetic concept, while internally to the IRIS project. Polytechnic of Milan has further advanced the hydraulic drive concept. IRIS is currently evaluating candidate concepts for the internal CRDMs to proceed with the preliminary design of the chosen one. 

The IRIS design provides for multiple levels of defence for accident mitigation (in-depth-in-depth (DID)), resulting in extremely low core damage probabilities. In addition to the traditional DID levels (barriers, redundancy, diversity, etc.) IRIS introduces a very basic level of DID, i.e., elimination by design of accident initiators or reduction of their consequences/probability. This is implemented through the safety-by-design IRIS philosophy, which was briefly presented in the introduction. 

Green chemistry is not a new type of chemistry, but a new philosophy of chemistry, one focused on the reduction of risks and inherent safety. It is about new benign by design alternatives. It is not more complex than traditional chemistry but it is a distinctive approach based on the evaluation of toxicity of materials and their by-products when designing a safer, cleaner, and cost-efficient process. 

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