hello and welcome to technically speaking a podcast where scientists and engineers come together to chat about a common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity i'm laura and in this episode i'm joined by amica and hopefully a few others to talk about risk what it means to us and how we handle it in our various professions so anika what does risk mean to you um i guess risk i don't know we talk about it all the time but it's so hard to define um for me i think it's like things that
could happen that we have to be aware of when we're planning our activities day to day i guess that's the simplest way that i would i would describe it fair enough you work in a lab right yeah so i i do research in nuclear fusion um i don't actually work with a lot of active samples but i still work in labs with heavy machinery and kind of materials and large components and stuff like that um so yeah when we're in labs we always have to do risk assessments um when we're planning experiments and
things like that um so that's kind of a risk in day-to-day um and because i work at university they also make you do risk assessments for every kind of process as well um so one example is that one of my students needed a chair to work from home um and that was one of my most recent risk assessments was writing a risk assessment to receive a chair at home but that there are risks and you know the university can't be liable in case you hurt your back when you're handling a chair
or you catch covet from the delivery driver so i had to have things like stay two meters away from the delivery leave the box to quarantine for like uh i don't know i wrote maybe 72 hours and then um yeah then you can construct your chair and be careful when lifting heavy components and things like that um but yeah it's a super kind of common activity that we have to do is making risk assessments yeah that's a good point i guess a lot of the time you kind of you do a risk
assessment without thinking about it pretty much in day-to-day life as well i guess i mean uh you've probably heard me talk about this before but a good example is crossing the road isn't it well like obviously you check to see if there's any traffic and you check to see if it if it makes sense to cross where you are and if not you find another place like a crossing rather than just walking straight out onto the road so yeah there's so many risks all around us
and i think some of them are acceptable to us and some of them are unacceptable and then when they're not acceptable we have to put measures in place to to mitigate against them so like when you cross the road it's probably not acceptable to cross it when there's the traffic coming so we put measures in place like having a pedestrian crossing where someone can safely cross the road when cars can stop and stuff like that yeah so the the risk assessment you were talking about
um so with getting a chair delivered how does that differ to a risk assessment that you would do if you were working in the lab or is it exactly the same so the actual risk assessment like a piece of paper is the same piece of paper and so the whole thought process behind it is the same um but obviously in the lab it's it's different what we kind of things well some of them actually the same like lifting heavy stuff is a pretty common one um in labs but then there's other
specific risks to certain chemicals or certain things that you you might use um and for that then you have to you know look at procedures and databases and make sure you're following best practice to try and keep the risk as low as as reasonably possible um in the lab okay so like some of the risk customs i've done in the past you have like a matrix sort of a five by five table um apparently waving your arms around with a podcast doesn't work very well i'll try that too you can't hear nothing
um but yeah it's sort of like you've multiplied the chance of it happening um the probability of something happening by the consequences of if that thing were to happen what would it be so like the most extreme is you will definitely die from doing this activity um in an hour lab that's like a five and a five so it's a on the probability scale it's a five and the uh the consequences scale it's five as well and then we use sort of those numbers to figure out
what sort of mitigation you have to put in place to make it even safer do you guys do that as well yeah yeah so we put mitigations in place so like if it's too dangerous we just don't do the activity if there's no mitigations you can put in place or it's yeah it's not safe for someone to do it then you don't do it um but otherwise yeah we put mitigations in place um and try and reduce that number as much as possible um but obviously things can can still happen
and not all risks are taken into account so we're joined by a silent civil engineer today um who lost their voice during their work uh having to teach uh for three and a half hours constantly um so you could argue that that's the risk that you could lose your voice if you're having to talk for three and a half hours straight on on zoom but no one carried our risk assessment for that i think yeah i'm getting a shaking head because they can't speak but um yeah i get yeah i guess they're also
like two different kind of consequences there because there's the physical effect the health effect there's also like i guess you can't really do your job anymore if your job all revolves around speaking and talking to students how are you meant to do your next lecture so yeah i think a lot of the time we talk about risk as being like the physical effects but i guess like project manager would think about it with all the risk of like project failure or um yeah something similar
absolutely i think both of them yeah the effects of the project and then affect your own well-being as well but i think um because you work in nuclear as well right laura so um in nuclear i think that's a really interesting way of like how risk is managed um so like i remember when i was at uni that there's like different kind of i don't know if a project management approach is the right word but it's like we you identify the risk and then you have to reduce reduce the risk so
if you're working with active material that might be like shielding or things like that to reduce the dose um that you're receiving um but then there were a few other ones which i can't remember them as well now but it's like if a system fails you need to have another one in place so say you've got the shielding but say something happened to that shielding you need to have another one just in case i can't remember the word for it this is a special one didn't see i think yes yeah
thanks yeah that's what i was thinking of yeah i remember this from so i used to be a nuclear safety assessor many many years ago and so you see this professionally and yeah if um depending on what the consequences were um like the final risk level once you've multiplied your consequences by um the probability that would then dictate how many control measures you had to put in place so yeah you'd have like a secondary backup i think nuclear calls it like defense in depth having all
these redundant systems um which sounds a bit weird in a way saying something's redundant but it's so important like yeah if something like i think was it with them yeah i can't remember what it was but you know just having yeah different levels in places if one doesn't work having another one just to catch um issues is yeah very very useful yeah so we've talked a bit about like crossing roads and things um so what's the most most risky thing that you've ever done either
professionally or at home you might not answer actually good question i think it's really hard because maybe we didn't know something we did was risky as well right because you only know if something's risky if like either if something uh bad happens to you or if it doesn't happen to you how do you know you weren't just lucky and like if you weren't aware that the risk was there that's i'm sure i've done that plenty of times like done really especially as a kid
i'm sure i almost died several several times but i just wasn't aware of the risk um like once i remember when i was a kid i climbed a tree um like in flip-flops all the way to the top and fell like on and the tree was on top of concrete so if i'd been young and done a risk like if i'd done a risk assessment at that time i mean like that's not wise to climb a tree in flip flops which is above concrete but i'm like no i'm gonna do this um so i climbed the tree
and i got to the top and then i fell and i felt all the way down but luckily little anika was a bit chubby and got stuck um hanging upside down uh over the concrete in the tree um and then like my brothers they went to get my mom and my mom didn't believe them that like her daughter could be so stupid to be stuck in a tree um and then she just came like five minutes later with a crooked butt to this day i thought okay if i've not died from falling from the tree my mom
is not gonna kill me with this this crooked butt uh for being so so naughty i don't know what she planned to do whether it was to hit me or to like poke me out of the tree um but that was a pretty risky thing that i did but i've survived and you know i'm alive to this day but at the time i wasn't aware it was risky so you know i think being aware is a big part of part of risk sorry i rambled a lot about my childhood experience that was very entertaining i can't stop laughing about that now
um yeah it's a good point though like if you didn't know and if it were risky you probably wouldn't done it in the first place right but then because i was quite foolish like i did a lot of foolish things as a child i don't know like i think a lot of i don't know our children are aware of risks because we have to like tell them right like to don't touch this don't do that that's hot don't jump here and there but then it's a balance between like instilling fear
in them of not trying something but then also not hurting themselves um severely yeah yeah so we were talking about this sort of perception of risk weren't we i mean you said yeah i work in the nuclear industry i work with nuclear waste and a lot of people kind of think that's quite a risky thing like well i'm still around and i i think the part the reason people think it's risk is they don't really know what it is and how we handle it and how you can handle it safely it just it
comes across in like the public consciousness is this awful thing that should be avoided at all costs but it's kept out of the public domain because that's the safest way of handling it to do it in a controlled way right which then creates this goldman mythology around it so because because the nuclear industry doesn't put so much um procedures in place like to mitigate against risk and to avoid like serious incidents that actually like puts more fear in i think public perception in a
way just because they see all of these things that oh why are they having to do all of this if it's if it's safe to use why are people putting all of these things in place um whereas i actually think it's a positive thing that we hit that they're so open and transparent that they have all of these procedures in place and they do all of this stuff because so many other industries we don't hear about all the like risks that they might have whether that's like fossil fuels
or um other like i don't know mining industries things like that that are really risky but we don't hear about all of those things that might happen um as a result of the procedures that have been put in place because they're just not as open i think um yeah i think as far as it's quite difficult to get across how risky something is if if it's quite a difficult thing to talk about anyway like so the nucleus is quite complicated right and like you can't see radiation you
can't sense it unless you have some of the sensor but then like the same is true of the gas that we pipe into our own houses to heat them to run the boiler you can only detect that you can smell it because ascent was put into it otherwise you wouldn't know if there were a leak you wouldn't be able to sense it unless you had some other equipment but it's a difficult thing to get across isn't it i think people say when they smell gas they don't think well that's actually the smell that's
put into it and it's the same in nuclear you can't sense radiation unless you've got some other device or a radiation makes a lot of things glow doesn't it so we're all covered in something that luminesced when it was exposed to radiation radiation all around us as well right so it's not radiation that's dangerous it's the amount of radiation so like if you eat a banana that contains radiation or if you go into the hospital because you've you've hurt yourself and you need
an x-ray that would actually you know if you didn't have the x-ray that would hinder the doctors so it's you know small amounts of radiation are you know okay for us and safe and they actually can be really beneficial to to our lives like bananas are really not because of the radiation but bananas are good for us and x-rays help doctors um you know find broken bones and things like that oh yeah if you're allergic to a banana they're not so good that's true but um yeah so it's all about you know
the quantities as well um and it goes back to that table you said about like finding um probabilities of things as well so it's like the probability um and the severity of of the consequence and those things those two things put together i think they they make the risk yeah yeah that's a very good point in all the years i've been working with radiation i'm pretty sure i get more of a radiation dose from like a single transatlantic flight than i do from my day job
um not like the space radiation the radiation that comes from space when i'm in a plane is taken into account when the risk assessment is done for the other things that i do so you can kind of see how it becomes more complicated to figure out what the effects would actually be to someone that doesn't necessarily know as much about it so i guess that's why the perception is that it's quite a risky thing but when you come to understand it and you learn the details it suddenly seems
you're a lot more comfortable with it i guess the same is true of piping gas into your house or crossing a road or lots of things we do in everyday life i think one of the most risky things i did at home was working on my household electrics i can't quite remember what i was doing but i'd unscrewed a plug socket from the wall i might have been painting behind it or something or painting around it and not wanting to get paint everywhere i think something might have gotten stuck in it and i was
trying to get it out and i had completely forgotten to isolate the circuit before i started working on it so you know working on live electrics not a good idea because electrocution is dead yeah so definitely more risky than some of the things i've done in the lab which was just a lapse in concentration i think yeah and i think that's why we need all of these risk assessments and stuff as well right because we're human so it's so easy for humans to make mistakes
so when you have to like stop and think about things then at least you're like aware these are the the dangers um yeah yeah and i guess you'll have to get that balance right as you were saying like how do you teach children about risk or they just inherently pick it up you don't want to go too far and constrain people too much and make them afraid to do anything um yeah i was reading an article just recently about have you heard of a micro mort no no it's um it's a measure of what's
the official definition um so it's uh your your chances in a million of being killed by doing a particular activity um so you're one of a thousand chance of being killed by sitting on a chair is uh yeah just over one 1.3 micromorts risk of death by sitting on a chair because you could fall off it and injure yourself in a way that you will die apparently no way i'm still on a it didn't say what kind of chair i don't know if it's safer because that was arms and whatever else
you just said you did a risk of second for a chair right yeah i to be better going back to my old uh yeah my student who had to make a risk assessment for a chair delivery that's yeah but i didn't know that there's a whole unit for that that's really crazy yeah and quantify that i think it's based on like statistically like i guess how many people have been admitted to hospital um as a result of falling off a chair and then died or something like that i don't actually know to be honest uh
i need to look into it a bit more to know how it's calculated but uh yeah there's loads of stuff like um the risk of death from driving a car 400 kilometers approximately a micro mall as well so roughly the same as sitting in a chair um climbing my everest seems really risky uh 40 000 micro remotes per cent it's not a surprise for some of the documentaries i've seen now yeah to be fair i haven't seen document i watched the movie everest and i was like yeah don't plan to be climbing any
himalayan mountains um yeah well no but then you've seen one movie and assumed it's really really dangerous right but that movie obviously yeah in a certain way that is true so yeah and then i've got the data that backed up it's 40 000 microns um um yeah you'll stay sitting in my chair yeah that's only one i can sit on my chair 40 000 times and it's the same as climbing everest yeah well i should do that as like an activity i'm coming out i'm staying on my 40 000
bombshell i think we've been talking for quite a while now can we answer one question we've had the questions done in the chat okay just let's let's try this interactive question type thing in case like we have viewers in the future who's sending questions oh yeah like live twitter questions yeah go for it so the question in the chat from rahma is do you ever feel risk assessments hold holds your work back and do you get frustrated by it even though it's so useful
um i i would say no because it well it makes you sit down and think about the work and actually plan it out and figure out the best way of doing it but then i guess sometimes i do feel like all the safety procedures you have to go through do seem a bit onerous i guess that you'd have then have to think about is the risk assessment really appropriate for the work that you're doing but i think if i hadn't been trained in how to do risk assessments and spent an awful lot of time working
with potentially risky things but in a safe way i don't think i'd translated that into doing things at home so you know working on my household electrics or riding my mountain bike which apparently is quite a risky thing i think i would probably do that in probably a more dangerous way if i wasn't aware of how useful risk assessments are what about you um i don't think they've ever held my work back to be honest it can't be frustrating when you're doing it for like a chair
like that kind of stuff i do find frustrating because i feel then you're just jumping through hoops because you know sometimes you know people are writing risk assessments and it's just there you know for liability purposes and things like that and you're like are people actually thinking about what they're doing does it still hold that same value and then i think that can be a bit dangerous if people just think oh it's just a risk assessment i don't need to know
what's in there and stuff because actually they are really important even you know for other things because yeah if you don't follow them then you're not aware of dangers which especially if you're responsible for other people um i think can be really important so i haven't felt that they've held my work back sometimes i can get frustrated when it is on something that i think is trivial or mundane that might kind of go against like the bigger picture of because sometimes it goes the other way
right they're like you have to do like all of this stuff just so something bad doesn't happen to you but then doing all of those things might induce more like you know dangers into your life like so for this same chair what a great example you knew chairs would be great examples for risk so initially i would have bought it because you know universities have set suppliers or whatever so the first supply i bought it from they're like we can't deliver it to your home because um like in case someone
uh buys other things from us like chemicals or whatever and delivers it to their home we have a no home delivery policy even for a chat but we can send it to the university and you can pick it up but i'm like no that's the point that we're not allowed in the university my student doesn't have a chair so i can't send it to the university for the for the student to go to university to get a chair to bring it home because otherwise he could have just gone to university and found a chair in
any old building and bought it home in the first place the point was that he can't go and he has to get it delivered to home so sometimes like i don't know whether it's like bureaucracy or whatever so even though that's because of the risk that forced us to then buy it from somewhere else and things like that so in that example that that company lost business of a chair um because of their risk assessment of that we can't let people deliver stuff to their home um
but yeah yeah sorry i don't know if that made sense but no it did i think the take-home message was um risk assessments are useful but they have to be done in an appropriate manner so the mitigation has to be proportional to the risk um the consequences that are entailed and it's it's daft apply a blanket risk assessment to everything yeah yeah i think you can i couldn't put it better that was a really nice way of putting it i think yeah cool well i think we've reached the end
of everything we have to say about risk so i guess we will end the podcast here