Prospective Method for Estimating Occupational Health Risks in New Energy Technologies

摘要

In design, development, and acceptance of new energy technologies, concern for health and safety is increasingly important. Determining risks for emerging technologies is difficult because health statistics associated with these new alternatives are unavailable. Nevertheless boundaries on such risks must be determined to identify potentially significant hazards and to permit technology comparisons to be made. An approach to determining occupational health costs is to disaggregate labor requirements of an emerging industy by different worker classifications. Risks to workers can then be determined for these classifications from occupational health statistics of related industries. By summing risks for each worker classification, prospective estimates of individual and societal risk from an emerging technology can be developed. Although this approach identifies accident-related effects, it cannot be used to quantitate occupationally induced disease. An example of this method analyzing different photovoltaic fabrication alternatives is given. Individual vs. societal risk is considered in these analyses. (ERA citation 07:044781)