ANCOLD Archives

Risk and Resilience in Mining

We are only two weeks away from the Risk and Resilience in Mining Conference. It will take place in Vancouver (Nov. 13th to 16th) with the following program. Risk and Resilience in Mining Let’s adopt a bit of a polemical stance, just to stir the discussion. First of all, in particular as it relates to the term resilience, are we sure we need to “invent a new word” for it? Isn’t it just “returning to good sense engineering” what we…

What Fukushima (2010) nuclear accident, the Twin Towers (9/11) terror attack, deadly traffic accidents and Aquila earthquake (Italy), hurricanes have in common?

In this blogpost we attempt an update of Whitman’s and ANCOLD tolerance/acceptability curves. These link casualties from man-made or natural catastrophes, large dams failures to a “tolerable” annual probability. The attempt shows evidence for a G8-wide societal acceptability which has only slightly changed since the original studies by Whitman.. We have already discussed many times how well-balanced and sustainable decisions can only be taken if risks are compared to properly defined risk tolerance /acceptability criteria. Comparison of various risk…