• Journal of Korean Society of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene
• /
• v.16 no.4
• /
• pp.413-427
• /
• 2006

It is necessary to study and develop guidelines for providing comfort and health indoor air quality for office workers since air-tight envelope system of current office building may cause poor indoor air quality. The purpose of this study is to propose guideline for volatile organic compounds in office base on the field study, human health risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis. The field study was conducted to survey the concentrations of volatile organic compounds in indoor air of 69 offices from June to September, 2005 in Seoul and Gyeonggi-do. The rate of excess to guideline of volatile organic compounds in indoor air of new apartment on the Ministry of Environment in Korea(MOE) was surveyed 37.6% for benzene, 6.8% for toluene, and 1.5% for ethylbenzene. As the result of human health risk assessment, mean cancer risk did not exceed 10-6 which is guideline of US.EPA. Also, total hazard index did not exceed 1 which is guideline of US.EPA. Through the cost-benefit analysis of angle on the social-economics to verify the necessary to establish the standards of volatile organic compounds for improvement and development of indoor air quality in office, the present value of benefit was higher than the present value of cost. With the above considerations in mind, it is suggested that the field study for indoor air quality in offices should be expanded and human health risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis be performed th offer scientific data for decision-making of policy for improvement and management of indoor air quality in office.

• Toxicological Research
• /
• v.28 no.3
• /
• pp.173-178
• /
• 2012

This study investigated the human health risks of trichloroethylene from Industrial Complex A. The excessive carcinogenic risks for central tendency exposure were $1.40{\times}10^{-5}$ for male and female residents in the vicinity of Industrial Complex A. The excessive cancers risk for reasonable maximum exposure were $2.88{\times}10^{-5}$ and $1.97{\times}10^{-5}$ for males and females, respectively. These values indicate that there are potential cancer risks for exposure to these concentrations. The hazard index for central tendency exposure to trichloroethylene was 1.71 for male and female residents. The hazard indexes for reasonable maximum exposure were 3.27 and 2.41 for males and females, respectively. These values were over one, which is equivalent to the threshold value. This result showed that adverse cancer and non-cancer health effects may occur and that some risk management of trichloroethylene from Industrial Complex A was needed.

• Journal of the Mineralogical Society of Korea
• /
• v.28 no.4
• /
• pp.309-323
• /
• 2015

This study was initiated to propose the method for human risk assessment suitable to metal mine area. Using a variety of exposure parameters extracted from the investigation of abandoned metal mines, the proposed method was applied to assess the risk of As and heavy metal contamination for inhabitants (male and female adults and child) within an abandoned mine area. Based on the results of risk assessment, in addition, target remediation concentrations of each media (soil, groundwater, and surface water) were estimated. The results indicate that total carcinogenic risk (TCR) and hazard index (HI) representing carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic risks, respectively, were calculated to exceed the tolerable levels (1.00E-6 and 1) with regard to two exposure pathways (groundwater and crop intakes) and As. Thus, the human risk of study area was evaluated to be significant. Based on the target risk (TR) for carcinogens, the remediation concentrations of soil were computed to be 6.83~6.85 mg/kg and 18.41~18.46 mg/kg for As and Pb, respectively. In terms of target hazard index (THI) for non-carcinogens, the remediation concentrations of soil were calculated to be 17.38 mg/kg for Cu and 9.13 mg/kg for As.

• Environmental Analysis Health and Toxicology
• /
• v.22 no.1 s.56
• /
• pp.1-8
• /
• 2007

Biological monitoring, analyses of internal dose for exposure to toxicants, has been thought as one of the belt approaches for risk assessment. As the amount detected in human samples is generally very low, typically in the parts-per-bilion (ppb) or parts-per-trillion (ppt) range, analytic technologies such at HPLC, GC/MS, LC/MS, and LC/MS/MS have been continuously developed. In addition, route specific and sensitive exposure biomarkers have been developed for proper biological monitoring. PBPK modeling, particularly reverse dosimetry, has been emphasized as an useful method via interpretation of biological monitoring results for regulation of toxicants. Thus, this review is focused on the use of PBPK dosimetry models for toxicology research and risk assessment in Korea.

• Environmental Analysis Health and Toxicology
• /
• v.12 no.3_4
• /
• pp.31-41
• /
• 1997

Public concerns about hazardous health effect from the exposure to organic by-products of the chlorination have been increased. There are numerous studies reporting that chlorination of drinking water produces numerous chlorinated organic by-products including THMs, HAAs, HANs. Some of these products are known to be animal carcinogens. The purpose of this study was to estimate health risk of DBPs by chlorinated drinking water ingestion in Seoul based on methodologies that have been developed for conducting risk assessment of complex-chemical-mixture. The drinking water sample was collected seperately at six water treatment plant in Seoul at March, April, 1996. In tap water of households in Seoul, DBPs were measured wilfh the mean value of 36.6 $\mu$g/L. Risk assessment processes,. which include processes for the estimation of human cancer potency using animal bioassay data and calculation of human exposure, entail uncertainties. In the exposure assessment process, exposure scenarios with various assumptions could affect the exposure amount and excess cancer risk. The reference dose of haloacetonitriles was estimated to be 0.0023 mg/kg/day by applying dibromoacetonitrile NOAEL and uncertainty factor to the mean concentration. In the first case, human excess cancer risk was estimated by the US EPA method used to set the MCL (maximum contaminant level). In the second and third case, the risk was estimated for multi-route exposure with and without adopting Monte-Carlo simulation, respectively. In the second case, exposure input parameters and cancer potencies used probability distributions, and in the third case, those values used point estimates (mean, and maximum or 95% upper-bound value). As a result, while the excess cancer risk estimated by US EPA method considering only direct ingestion tended to be underestimated, the risk which was estimated by considering multi-route exposure without Monte-Carlo simulation and then using the maximum or 95% upper-bound value as input parameters tended to be overestimated. In risk assessment for Trihalomethanes, considering multi-route exposure with adopting Monte-Carlo analysis seems to provide the most reasonable estimations.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
• /
• v.14 no.4
• /
• pp.333-339
• /
• 2019

Cobots are industrial robots with greatly enhanced safety functions that enable them to work in the same space with workers without protector. Cobots are regulated by the Industrial Safety and Health Act and must be certified according to the manufacturing stage, installation stage and usage stage. The ISO 10218-2 standard applied in the installation phase is difficult to apply in the field. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a risk assessment method based on ISO 12100 standard. This paper proposes a new methodology that combines 'JSA' and 'What-if', which reflects the human error and the lack of known risk factors. Accordingly, a new risk assessment template was proposed and the effectiveness of the developed new template was examined. The current cobot safety regulations need to be unified with safety inspections scheme, and robot safety experts and infrastructures need to be expanded and Robot safety regulations should be unified to 'Robot Act'. Based on this research, risk assessment methods suitable for the field need to be developed additionally, and robot safety regulation needs to be transformed to promote the industry.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
• /
• v.21 no.2 s.74
• /
• pp.22-28
• /
• 2006

This paper presents assessment of possibility on the human risk for the electromagnetic field of unbalanced two coupled three-phase transmission line using fuzzy theory. Three phase load flow program was developed which employed a Newton-Raphson method as a tool to analyze system unbalanced. This research presents a method of handling two coupled three phase transmission system unbalance analysis and unbalanced power demand as a function of voltages. As the results of case study, in case of 345[kV] T/L, the electric field intensity was 10.9540[kV/m], magnetic field intensity was 0.2567[G] in severest case. The results showed that the membership of a proposition fuzzy '10.9540 [kV/m] is hazardous' is 0.6349. As the analytic results using the fuzzy qualifier term, the membership in case of very false is 0.1379 and fairly false is 0.6124, respectively. In assessment of fuzzy measure possibility for the electromagnetic field, this paper used probability of fuzzy arid measure of fuzziness technique.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.55 no.1
• /
• pp.119-130
• /
• 2023

Among the various elements of probabilistic safety assessment (PSA), human failure events (HFEs) and their dependencies are major contributors to the quantification of risk of a nuclear power plant. Currently, the dependency among HFEs is reflected using a post-processing method in PSA, wherein several drawbacks, such as limited propagation of minimal cutsets through the fault tree and improper truncation of minimal cutsets exist. In this paper, we propose a method to model the HFE dependency directly in a fault tree using the if-then-else logic. The proposed method proved to be equivalent to the conventional post-processing method while addressing the drawbacks of the latter. We also developed a software tool to facilitate the implementation of the proposed method considering the need for modeling the dependency between multiple HFEs. We applied the proposed method to a specific case to demonstrate the drawbacks of the conventional post-processing method and the advantages of the proposed method. When applied appropriately under specific conditions, the direct fault-tree modeling of HFE dependency enhances the accuracy of the risk quantification and facilitates the analysis of minimal cutsets.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
• /
• v.38 no.6
• /
• pp.72-78
• /
• 2023

The purpose of this paper is to derive a quantified approach for Operator Manual Actions (OMAs) based on the existing fire Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) methodology developed by the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI). The existing fire HRA method was reviewed, and supplementary considerations for OMA quantification were established through a comparative analysis with NUREG-1852 criteria and the review of the existing literature. The OMA quantification approach involves a timeline that considers the occurrence of Multiple Spurious Operations (MSOs) during a Main Control Room Abandonment (MCRA) determination and movement towards the Remote Shutdown Panel (RSP) in the event of a Main Control Room (MCR) fire. The derived failure probability of an OMA from the approach proposed in this paper is expected to enhance the understanding of its reliability. Therefore, it allows moving beyond the deterministic classification of "reliable" or "unreliable" in NUREG-1852. Also, in the event of a nuclear power plant fire where multiple OMAs are required within a critical time range, it is anticipated that the OMA failure probability could serve as a criterion for prioritizing OMAs and determining their order of importance.

• Safety and Health at Work
• /
• v.13 no.1
• /
• pp.131-133
• /
• 2022