RESOURCES
Sharing is Caring
Access the latest bulletins sharing real-world learnings from across the process and nuclear safety community.
Issue No. 1 – Feyzin
How an escalating LPG release and fire demonstrated the importance of plant layout, emergency response and understanding BLEVE hazards.
Issue No. 2 – Challenger and Columbia
How technical warning signs can be weakened by organisational pressure, flawed communication and the normalisation of recurring problems.
Issue No. 3 – Fukushima Daiichi
How assumptions about extreme events and the loss of interconnected safeguards challenged the resilience of an entire nuclear site.
Issue No. 4 – Chernobyl
How technical weaknesses, organisational pressure and operation outside intended limits combined in a catastrophic system failure.
Issue No. 5 – Didion Milling
How combustible dust hazards, inadequate engineering controls and repeated warning signs culminated in a fatal industrial explosion.
Issue No. 6 – Air France Flight 447
How automation, human factors and loss of situational awareness turned a recoverable event into a catastrophe.
Issue No. 7 – Seveso
How an uncontrolled chemical reaction and toxic release reshaped Europe’s approach to major accident prevention.
Issue No. 8 – ExxonMobil Rotterdam
How a complex restart, misunderstood system interactions and changing operating conditions led to a major refinery fire.
Issue No 9 -Toulouse 25 years
The Toulouse accident shows how familiar materials such as ammonium nitrate can still cause catastrophic consequences when their condition, storage and major accident potential are not fully understood.
Issue No. 10 - Phillips Pasadena and Capeco
23 October, marks the anniversaries of the Phillips Pasadena explosion in 1989 and the CAPECO explosion in 2009.
One release occurred during maintenance, the other during a tank transfer. Both show how weaknesses in everyday operations, technical safeguards and management can combine to allow a major accident.
Twenty years separated them. Their lessons remain relevant to how we manage hazardous activities today.
Issue No. 11 - Sandoz 40 years on
A warehouse fire near Basel became an environmental disaster hundreds of kilometres downstream.
On 1 November 1986, contaminated firefighting water from the Sandoz site entered the Rhine, killing aquatic life and disrupting drinking-water abstraction across national borders.
The accident influenced the development of the Seveso framework, strengthening attention to hazardous storage and environmental consequences.