On the Possibility of Uniform and Counterproductive Identical Criteria for Assessing the Risk of an Industrial Accident
Authors:   STC «Industrial Safety» CJSC, Grazhdankin A.I. , Pecherkin A.S. ,   STC «Industrial Safety» CJSC, Sidorov V.I. ,   Fund of James Bruce
Published: December 2023

The risk-oriented approach in ensuring industrial safety is intended to orient industrialists, supervisory authorities and the expert community in the existing emergency hazards and threats of today industrial Russia. In recent decades, there is a dangerous trend of opportunistic introduction of universal criteria for safe operation. In fact, instead of a risk-oriented approach, a risk-prescriptive approach is proposed. Any risk assessment methodology is only a means for measuring hazard, and is not at all a guarantor or a witness of compliance with safety. In order to eliminate measurement errors as much as possible, it is required to evaluate not the absolute level of accident hazard, but the relative one. The tools for measuring hazard (accident risk assessment at a hazardous production facility) cannot give a reliable, comprehensive conclusion about the safety of a hazardous production facility. Safety is not a mechanistic absence of hazard, but a systemic property of the technical-social system «source of hazard — those at risk» to function in conditions of changing hazards and threats that arise from them. Hazards are objective, and safety is a cultivated systemic property of hazardous industries to prevent the transformation of hazards into threats. In a risk-oriented approach to industrial safety, it is required to distinguish between information social engineering technology risk management (impact on ideas about hazards and threats) and organizational and technical management of a directly hazardous production facility, controlled by hazard analysis with a reliable assessment of the risk of an accident. The main criterion for ensuring the safe operation of a hazardous production facility should be considered a set of limit values of safe operation parameters and conditions for non-occurrence of emergency threats of major industrial accidents in the performance of existing industrial safety requirements. Criteria for acceptable accident risk must be established in accordance with the industry level of emergency threats. Due to the significant variety of possible causes of accidents, scenarios for their occurrence and development, a wide range of possible consequences of industrial accidents, it is not possible to establish absolutely identical, so-called «unified» criteria for acceptable accident risk for different hazardous production facilities: acceptable accident risk as a measure of acceptable hazard, cannot be accepted as a single criterion for ensuring industrial safety of a hazardous production facility. Unified criteria for assessing the risks of accidents at industrial facilities are not single and individual microscopic probabilities that are not the same for all different industries. Unified criteria are a unified set of methods for developing, establishing, testing and adopting criteria for assessing hazards using risk as a special measure of hazard.