Trends, problems and outlook in risk assessments: Are we making progress?

Process industry brings economic activity and provides us with unique materials. Inherent to it are risks of loss of containment of hazardous substances and the ensuing risks of explosions, fires and toxic spread. Since for several reasons industry favours locations near crossways of trade and traffic and thus vicinity to population is inevitable, risk assessment has in many places become a routine based on legislation. The paper will review the state of the art and will call for improvements. 1. The advance of application of risk analysis With the development of amongst others crude-oil based petrochemical industry in the late ’60-ties of last century large-scale chemical plants were built in areas with easy access to sea and inland waterways, mostly harbours, to enable transportation of feed stock and products and to find people to run the plants. After several catastrophic accidents, mostly explosions, but also fires and spread of toxic clouds safety concerns arose, which with rising prosperity and consciousness of people over time grew. Risk analysis as a methodology to describe and delimit the risk of chemical process operations was introduced in the mid-seventies to the then newl