Inherent Safety and Reactive Chemicals
The Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center list provides information to industry, government agencies, academia, and other interest groups about process safety, safety alerts, continuing education, and center announcements.
Recent events have focused a lot of attention on two quite important issues with regard to process safety. They are "Inherent Safety" and "Reactive Chemicals." Both are very important issues and progress must be made in each area if advances are to be made with regard to process safety performance. However, we must tread with caution and make sure that good science based approaches are utilized in developing whatever plans may be necessary on a nation-wide basis. Otherwise we run the risk of unintended consequences.
With regard to inherent safety, the Center published a White Paper entitled, "Challenges in Implementing Inherent Safety Principles in New and Existing Chemical Processes." This paper defines inherent safety and contrasts it with more traditional approaches to safety. It illustrates through analogies with common household examples the challenges faced in evaluating and implementing inherently safer designs. The first challenge is simply to measure the degree of inherent safety in a way that allows comparisons of alternative designs, which may or may not increase safety or may simply redistribute the risk. The second is that because inherent safety is an intrinsic feature of a design, it is best implemented early in the design of a process plant, while the US has a huge base of installed process plants and little new construction. Thirdly, in developing inherently safer designs, there are significant technical challenges that require research and development efforts with limited short-term economic incentives. These challenges make regulation of inherent safety very difficult. We believe that a coordinated long-term effort involving government, industry, and academia is essential to develop and implement inherently safer designs. A similar approach has shown success in related areas such as green chemistry, energy conservation, and sustainable development.
With regard to the reactive chemicals issue, the Center provided to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) written comments entitled, "Challenges of Regulating or Implementing a Reactive Chemicals Hazard Management Program." These comments were provided during the Public Meeting held by the CSB on September 17, 2002, in Houston, Texas. Reactive chemicals represent significant hazards and have contributed to a large number of incidents resulting in fatalities, injuries, and property losses.
However, the CSB study and other information available in the open literature lead us to conclude that a majority of the reactive chemical incidents occurred because the owner/operator of the facility did not make use of the information easily available in the literature. In a smaller fraction of the incidents, the owner/operator did not have sufficient knowledge of the process chemistry involved. The Center document provides a discussion of the difficulties associated with regulating reactive chemicals. However, recommendations are provided on a reasonable path forward with regard to addressing reactive chemical hazard management.
These two documents are available on our website
for the general public to view at:
http://process-safety.tamu.edu/publications/whitepapers.htm
We hope you find the documents informative and helpful. Please feel free to contact the Center if you have questions on either one of the documents or need more information.
Sincerely,
The Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center
http://process-safety.tamu.edu
Mission: Lead the integration of process safety - through education, research, and service - into the education and practice of all individuals and organizations involved in chemical operations.