When I have a class, Risk Assessment, my teacher suggest us to use “Should We Risk It?: Exploring Environmental, Health, and Technological Problem Solving” book by the author Daniel M. Kammen and David M. Hassenzahl. It gives clear explanation about risk. I would recommend you to buy it. Another is Basics of Toxicology (Preserving the Legacy) by Kent, C. Actualy it is for my class Environmental Toxicology but it contains brief review about risk assessment and risk management. It’s worth having.

While I keep posting risk related in this site, it is important to having goals and objectives of the writing. There are several ideas I would like to accomplish by writing this risk blog. Let us consider three following situation.

(1) Suppose you are assigned for a risk project on your city. Your local authority would like to build a place to store hazardous waste, sort of radioactive waste. The place is designed to “store” radioactive waste for 1 thousand years, in a giant tunnel, twenty feet of diameter and thousands of feet depth. What would you proceed to do these following questions:
- what is the risk of human exposure from the site over the next one thousand years?
- what can be done to prevent such exposure?
- if estimates provided by the best available earth scientists vary by several orders of magnitude, how can we estimate the probability of future volcanic activity in the area?

(2) Toxicological and epidemiological studies suggest that benzene is carcinogen. Figures below show laboratory animal test and epidemiological test. You are asked to determine the likelihood that someone exposed to benzene in the workplace over thirty years will get cancer as a result. How would you address this issue?
- What is the relationship between animal and human metabolism, what does it tell us about carcinogenesis?
- what assumptions must we make about the mechanisms of cancer if we extrapolate from high to low dose?

(3) Suppose we have information summarizing accident data for major airlines in your country, and you are asked to rank the airlines according to how safe you believe them to be, and to estimate risks from future flights on each airlines. How would you proceed?

Hopefully, by reading this post, step by step, you should be able to establish and evaluate the major parameters of each issue, identify how the problem can be addressed, evaluate what information you have and what you still need, and characterize the uncertainty associated with possible solutions.