Risk criteria in EU

摘要

This paper focuses on risk criteria used in the EU for population living in vicinity of hazardous facilities. The criteria vary from fully risk-based and goal setting to the prescriptive consequence based criteria. In spite of the philosophical differences in the formulation of risk criteria, there is a single EU Directive (Seveso 2) on the control of major accident hazards involving chemicals which applies to every member state and clearly the level of safety across the EU should be very similar if not the same. Therefore the first aim of the paper was to minimise the differences between the variety of safety approaches across the EU in order to develop risk acceptance criteria with the potential to converge to a unified set. The second aim was to develop societal risk criteria completely consistent with the legally applied individual risk criteria.