NEWS OF THE WEEK
PLANT SECURITY: National Research
Council will examine alternative chemical manufacturing techniques
T
HE NATIONAL Research Council (NRC) will
soon begin exploring the application of inherently safer design for chemical manufacturing processes, a study requested and funded by Congress last year. The first public meeting takes place on Feb. 9 in Washington, D.C., with a report due in September. Inherently safer chemical manufacturing is an approach to minimize use and storage of toxic, flammable, or explosive chemicals through substitution, process modifications, and other techniques. The end result is to eliminate or at least minimize the impact of an accident if one occurs. The use of inherently safer design has been controversial—with some plant engineers saying it is difficult to apply and others saying it should be mandatory. NRC’s case study will look at an actual plant—the Bayer CropScience pesticide manufacturing facility in Institute, W.Va.—explains Dorothy Zolandz, director of the NRC panel that is conducting the study. Congress earmarked some $600,000 for the study after an accident at the Bayer facility in August 2008 killed two workers and came close to blasting debris into an aboveground tank storing some 13,000 lb of methyl isocyanate (MIC). The chemical was released after the 1984 Bhopal, India, plant explosion and killed and injured thousands of people. Since Bhopal, residents living near the Bayer plant have urged the company to phase out MIC. The plant is the only U.S. facility, and the only Bayer plant worldwide,
that uses MIC in production. Two weeks ago, a few days before the Chemical Safety & Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) released its report on the 2008 accident, Bayer said it would phase out MIC over the next 18 months (C&EN, Jan. 24, page 7). Still, NRC will move ahead with its study and has selected 10 panel members with backgrounds in chemical engineering, dispute resolution, occupational and environmental health, economics, and risk assessment. “Our study will examine more than An NRC panel will examine the potential use pipes and engineering,” Zolandz explains. “It will look at of inherently safer chemical manufacturing methods at chemical plants. the bigger picture—feasibility, cost-benefit implications, and community concerns,” she says, while illuminating the use of inherently safer process assessments. “Here we have an actual on-the-ground plant that we can use to enlighten us about how these assessments are carried out, what their capabilities and limitations are, and so forth,” Zolandz explains. “We have a real case study.” This is not a subject that “goes away” for CSB just because Bayer’s MIC use has ended, notes Daniel Horowitz, CSB’s managing director of congressional, public, and board affairs. “Our interest has always been how inherently safer designs can benefit industry as they strive to make processes safer,” Horowitz says. “We are hoping for advice from [NRC] on how we as an agency should look at these inherently safer technological issues in our accident investigations.”—JEFF JOHNSON SHU T T ERSTO CK
EXPLORING SAFER PROCESSES
SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY Interior Department is first to implement White House policy The Department of Interior last week became the first department to issue a new policy on scientific integrity based on a December 2010 memo from the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy. Groups concerned that the government has manipulated research results for political ends welcome the policy, which all agencies must put in place by April. “This policy sets forth clear expectations for all employees—political and career—to uphold the principles of scientific integrity and establishes a process for impartial review of alleged breaching
of those principles,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement. Salazar named Ralph Morgenweck, senior science adviser for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, as the Interior Department’s scientific integrity officer, a position established under the department’s new policy. Among the specifics in the policy are provisions to facilitate the free flow of scientific and scholarly information, assurances that department scientists may speak freely to the news media and the public on areas related to their work, and protections for whistle-blowers.
WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG
9
FEBRUARY 7, 2011
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), one of the watchdog groups lobbying for stronger federal policies on scientific integrity, thinks Interior’s policy has some ambiguities related to transparency and the rights of researchers to publish their findings, but says it is a significant step. “This is very much a work in progress but appears to be a good faith effort to grapple with a basket of knotty issues which heretofore have been kept out of sight,” PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch commented in a statement.—DAVID HANSON
