Uncertainty in Risk Analyses and Corporate Ethics

摘要

During 2010 and 2011 several prominent man-made events and at least one large natural event have drawn attention to corporate safety practices. Public criticism deals specifically with the inability to bring facilities to a “Safe State” and to mitigate consequences. Examples of such events include the 2010 Macondo blowout in the Gulf of Mexico and the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami with respect to nuclear reactors. In all these cases there is a need to focus on corporate ethics and elements of operations safety management that the corporations involved committed themselves to. Process Hazard Analyses (PHA) and Risk Analyses are important aspects of safety management. There are issues with both PHAs and Risk Analyses but in the aforementioned cases it was the scale of the severity that made them stick out. This raises questions concerning better consequence analysis and the rarity of extreme events. This paper uses the example of a vapour cloud explosion to discuss the inherent uncertainties in Risk Analyses and explores ways to assess risk trends by performing alternate risk assessments methods in addition to the “classical” release-dispersion-explosion-effect analysis.