Monday, March 31, 2008 - 11:30 AM
IEA Task 19 Hydrogen Safety Effort in Developing Uniform Risk Acceptance Criteria for the Hydrogen Infrastructure
This paper discusses the rationale and preliminary results of the Risk Management subtask efforts within International Energy Agency (IEA) Task 19 Hydrogen Safety to develop uniform risk acceptance criteria for the emerging hydrogen infrastructure and to harmonize Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) methods and data for use by the international community in evaluating the risk associated with hydrogen facilities as well as for development of risk-informed regulations, codes and standards. The public acceptance of a hydrogen facility design and operation should be determined by whether the associated risk meets the established acceptable risk criteria. Risk acceptance criteria for societal risk, though de facto exist everywhere, are not always obvious. In most Western European countries they are incorporated into law. In the USA and Canada , to the contrary, as in many other jurisdictions around the world, they are not publicly defined in any way and are, thus, subject to interpretation. However, a common theme when introducing new technologies is that it should not substantially increase the risk to the public. Furthermore, a reasonable approach for establishing risk criteria for hydrogen refueling stations is to equate it to the equivalent risk level presented by other fuels, specifically hydro-carbon fuels. Unfortunately, there are no explicit risk acceptance criteria for the existing gasoline-dominated fueling infrastructure (that can be utilized to determine an acceptable level of risk for a hydrogen fueling station). The establishment of uniform risk criteria also requires that the level of harm (i.e., the consequence level) that is represented in the risk evaluation be established. A harm criterion is a function of the type of hazardous situation (e.g., fire or explosion) and can involve different levels of harm. This paper will review the general concepts and definitions of risk and safety. In addition, the paper will present the results of a survey on risk acceptance and harm criteria used in different countries as well as provide detailed discussion of two example approaches on the use of risk acceptance and harm criteria in the US and Norway.
Presentation