To calculate the risk of an accident scenario, the essential information needed is the potential damage resulting from the accident along with the probability of the accident. Usually, accidents result in damage to either tangible assets such as equipment or intangible assets such as market value or company reputation. Compared to tangible losses, the intangible damages are more difficult to assess and are thus often ignored in risk assessments. For example, Capelle-Blancard and Marie-Aude (2010)discussed the loss of market value caused by accidents and found that shareholders suffer a
significant loss of about 1.3% in the two days following an accident. In the current research based on the severity of dust explosions, potential consequences are classified as: near miss, mishap, minor damage, significant damage and catastrophic damage. Category definitions were given in our previous work (Yuan et al., 2013), and are also listed in Table 3. The damage of different consequences can be weighted by equivalent economic losses as shown in Table 4, which is adopted from the consequence severity matrix proposed by Kalantarnia (2009).