Talk:As low as reasonably practicable

Is zero risk REALLY achievable?

How can you measure or determine zero risk (other than if the hazard is eliminated)? Eliminating the hazard is not always possible. 68.193.100.23 (talk) 21:53, 5 March 2008 (UTC)SAWilkins

These are some of the questions that led to the introduction of ALARP. It is not always possible, or desirable, to eliminate a particular hazard totally, and you are never going to be able to remove every risk in life. Instead of asking for things to be absolutely safe, asking for the level of risk to be as low as reasonably practicable allows a sensible judgement to be made. It recognises that as things get safer, further improvements will have diminishing returns. JRI (talk) 07:50, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Things to expand

• ALARP is starting to be taken up as best practice outside the UK. I'll try to dig out some references to standards that mention it. It would also be good to mention any non-UK laws that include ALARP / SFARP concepts. These are most likely in British Commonwealth countries that have similar legal systems.
• It would be good to mention why Europe disagreed with the concept, and add references for the legal challenge.

JRI (talk) 14:38, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

It says, "The European Commission had claimed that the SFARP wording in the Health & Safety at Work Act did not fully implement the requirements of the Framework Directive". Dwlegg (talk) 15:55, 5 January 2009 (UTC) dwlegg

There seems to be little or no information available on the limitations of ALARP for risk modeling. (jb) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.170.198.239 (talk) 14:18, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

This is because ALARP is not a risk modelling methodology. Although you might use some kind of measurement or modelling to help decide if a risk was ALARP, the principle just requires risk to be reduced, and does not place any constraints or limitations on how this is done. JRI (talk) 12:51, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

I know for a fact that a similar principle is used for radiation protection in the U.S., called ALARA. This article doesn't refer specifically to radiation, though, so I'm assuming this is used for any type of dangerous material. Still, adding information about ALARA (codified in 10 CFR 20 and several other U.S. regulation sources) would be helpful. I don't have the time to do that now so I've just added a globalize/UK tag to the article. Forteblast (talk) 14:47, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

That's useful. I know that the term ALARP is also used in the U.S. industry standard GEIA-STD-0010, and I have a feeling that it might come up in Australia and perhaps Canada too. It isn't used in France and Germany, but I just need to find some time to find some encyclopaedic references. JRI (talk) 12:51, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

ALARP is indeed used in ISO 14971, "Medical Devices--Application of risk management to medical devices." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.190.112.141 (talk) 17:43, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

ALARP was replaced by AFAP (as far as possible) in EN ISO14971:2012.

ALARP is not SFAIRP: The Australian debate

In Australia, ALARP and SFAIRP are currently considered to be very different things. (See for example, Figure 2 in Robinson & Francis "SFAIRP vs ALARP", Conference On Railway Excellence, Adelaide, 5 – 7 May 2014 http://www.r2a.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/CORE-2014-paper-SFAIRP-vs-ALARP.pdf ) somewhat counter to the claim on the main page. Thoglette (talk) 01:25, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

More from Robinson.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sfairp-equivalent-alarp-richard-robinson

https://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/sites/default/files/r2a_presentation_7_may_2014_with_eng_safety_disclaimer.pdf

Thoglette (talk) 01:31, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

References

Globalisation

I found the page, since I found a Swedish nuclear industry representative (in 1997) defending higher rates of radioactive liquid waste than in other countries by a reference to ALARA, which he claimed is the norm for reactor safety measures. His argument was, that, in those other countries, the power plants are cooled by river water, which often is used as drinking water downstreams; while the Swedish plants are cooled by sea water. Thus, the extra cost necessary for lowering the amounts of radionucleids in the waste water, is not "reasonable" in Sweden.

I thus was looking for ALARA, which however redirects here. Obviously, the term ALARA is not used exclusively in Northen America. Thus, a first act of globalisation could be to mention ALARA already in the introduction.

([This was the source I found - a rather good help for all the millions of you guys who speak Swedish:-) JoergenB (talk) 16:39, 20 March 2011 (UTC) 18.189.31.217

I also came here looking for ALARA. I'm only familiar with the concept from radiation protection, but find it to be a more broadly useful concept, so I was hoping to find an aticle about it's use in other fields. This ALARP thing is similar but the connotation and implementation seems to be somewhat different. It would be great for ALARA to have it's own article, but I don't know how much primary source material there is to draw upon.(talk) 21:44, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

ALARA is familiar in USA also, (I work with Radiation Equipment in USA). Some of the links you can see:

• https://www.ncsu.edu/ehs/radiation/forms/alara.pdf
• http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/alara.html
• http://hps.org/publicinformation/radterms/radfact1.html

--Dineshkumar Ponnusamy (talk) 22:21, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

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