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Professional Education in the Sandbox Hazard, Perceived Risk, Acceptable Risk George F. Atkinson, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
One of the more stirnulatine activities in this universitv is the Institute for Risk ~ e s e a r c hMemhers . range from ma& ematicians and economists throueh all shades of enaineers and scientists to social psycholo&ts and environm&tally oriented socioloeists. T t , introduce i n interesting question abuut chemical education wired by thedi~cu.isionsinmeetinyiof the Insrirute, i t is first necessary to clarify a few terms. A hazard is material or situation capable of producing undesired consequences, which may be injury to persons, damage to material goods, or delay in reaching desired goals. If i t is possible to ouantifv the orobahle extent of the undesired conseauences (inmoney, lost time, lost lives, etc.) and also the likelihood of the damaeina- event occurrine. ". the risk related to the hazard can also he expressed numerically. Manv Persons aware of or concerned about risks do not. and of&; cannot, make such numerical estimates and calcu: lations; nevertheless, they have in mind a perceived risk related to a particular hazard. The key question then hecomes: Is this intuitively. .perceived risk an acceptable risk? Prculiar views on perceived and acceptable risks are cclmmonls held, and are often contradictorily held by one perion about different matters. The risk of iniurv indou,nhill skiing is often perceived as appreciable, hut usually acceptahle. Flvine . .. in the face of often-ouoted statistics. manv, oersons . perceive the home as il saie p l x r , with acreptatde risk of iniurv. - . while reeardine" the hiehwav" as unsafe and its smnller risk of injury unacceptable. The education-related question raised by discussions was this. In a typical high school, what is the actual risk, the perceived risk, and the acceptable risk, to a student engaged in each of these types of activity: interschool team sports such as hockey or football, required physical education classes, use of power tools in shop classes, and lab experiments in science classes. I t seems generally agreed that the typical ratio of acceptable risk to perceived risk is much higher in the former cases than in the latter. Broken legs on the football field. or the occasional sorain or even fracture in the gym, produce little outcry for a ban on these activities. On the other hand. the percention that a small risk mav be incurred by wilful mishandling of an occasionally used chemical mav wtdl lead to it being- banned from school lab,,. ratories. Picric acid is a case in point. Laboratory explosions of this material, except when deliberate efforts are made to detonate it, are virtually unknown. I t is a useful reagent for preparation of derivatives. In my own student days, I recall that reporting that the picric acid bottle was empty resulted in someone being dispatched with an ice pick to the "explosive shed" in the building courtyard to chisel some pieces off the many-pound block of picric acid there. A few years ago,
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however, in a great flurry of media coverage, picric acid was proclaimed a dire hazard and removed (often by dubious procedures) from most school laboratories and from many university ones. Mercury is another substance which has high perceived risk and low acceptahle risk levels. When the initial wave of warnings about mercury swept through the country some years ago, one teacher offered for publication in a newsletter the proposal that an effective way to remove this hazardous material from the school was to dissolve it in concentrated nitric acid and flush it down the drain! I t would be interesting to compare the hazard from the vapor of mercury in a normally closed bottle with that from the cloud of nitrogen oxide fumes produced by the proposed reaction, to say nothing of comparing the hazard from the bottle of mercury with that from the same mercurv a t larae in the sewaae - system . and in thesrream into which it dr&ed. The communirv at 1ar.e is being fared with t h e ~ u e s t i m o f optimizing risk &mbin&ons from various sources by the increasing number of risk deadlocks being disclosed. A neighborhood discovers that wastes from radium-containing luminous paints used in WWII aircraft instruments is buried under its gardens. Demands are made that this hazard be cleaned up. Studies reveal that spending several years lying on the soil would produce an exposure about equal to one chest X-ray. Nonetheless, demands persist that the soil he removed-hut it must not pass down mv street. or be buried in my township! At a meeting of the ~iectrochemicalSociety, I heard arepresentative of Arthur D. Little praise a local scheme for incinerating PCB's in a cement kiln, actually im~rovinethe qnalitv of the product,. only. to be informed that loca~oppos~tion heing a-hazardous waste disposal site had shut down the operation. Such dilemmas are bringing home the notion that there is some risk in almost everything and that compromises must somehow be achieved. In the end, everything has to go somewhere. I sueeest that chemical education has to confront a not"" unrelated problem of its own, to some extent a t high school level, hut even more at college and university. If we are preparing the next generation of competent chemists, and we certainly need to he, one of the competences required is that of dialing appropriately in both plannine and action with hazardous materials. Such materials a r e n o t going to vanish. Solvents, toxicants like cyanide, nasty metals like chromium, and many others are going to continue to be made and used industrially. Even more, such materials are going to he used in the laboratories where chemical nrofessionals work. So are hazardous furnaces. vacuum systems, high voltages, and lasers. Handling them with thought and skill is going t o b e required of the techni-
cian from a college short course, and of the doctoral level professional. Learning to handle them with confidence and respect requires experience in handling them. How is this experience to be provided? On the other hand, if we are providing a certified safe sandbox, in which overgrown children may play with chemistry without possible harm, we will scrupulously avoid the presence of materials which require the development of skill and judgement together with an understanding of and respect for hazard which will result in a low and acceptable level of risk. At the moment, prudent action in the light of existing law and precedents seems to call for moves in the direction of the sandbox approach. This is very likely to he prejudicial to the development of our successor professionals, but I would argue that it is also detrimental to the development of our successor ordinary citizens who study some chemistry without any thought of becoming professionals. Some contact
with selected chemicals posing nontrivial hazards, under controlled conditions, will, I suggest, generate a more evenminded approach to hazards yet to arise than some of the ~ a n i scenes c we have seen in the recent nast. I t mav .. eive rise lo voters, taxpayers, and lawmakers who blend their intuitive . verce~riuns of risk wilh iome thouehtful recollection of . having in college actually handled or used something like that with some care hut without disaster. An important hook of a generation ago suggested that, if some students cannot survive intellectually in the university, we send them home for their own preservation, hut we do not change the university to accommodate them. In the same way, I suggest, we must preserve the training of competent professionals in chemistry, including some exposure to hazards with which they will have to cope as professionals. If that means excluding from some courses those who have not the will or the skill to confront those hazards in a manner leading to acceptably low risk, so he it. w
Volume 62 Number 12 December 1985
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