While I first was assuming this would comprise inactive but contaminated sites, 
I now see this is for operational sites only, which are dealing with chemical 
substances of which release into the environment could potentially pose a 
hazard to the people living nearby. Right?

How would we survey this? There is not much that can be surveyed worse ;-)
You would have to ask the operator of the site which are the substances they 
are dealing with (and they would not have to answer you, nor would it seem that 
if they answered their reply would be very reliable), then you would have to 
have the knowledge to understand their reply and to evaluate it, probably very 
few of us are in this position. So the only “reliable” source would be 
information collected, assessed and  released by the government. High risk 
could mean the substances are very dangerous, or a potential accident could 
release a lot of them, or it could mean the operations are executed in a way 
that an accident is more likely than it ideally should be, for example, if 
there wasn’t sufficient maintenance for a longer period of time, if the safety 
measurements aren’t the best/most recent available, problems in critical safety 
components have already been found, etc.

Am I guessing correctly that this is about kind and quantity of substances that 
are dealt with? 
The other possibly relevant information (for risk assessment) is likely not 
publicly available.

What is the benefit of having this information in OpenStreetMap? There is 
nothing the crowd could contribute to improve this data, we would be a mere 
distribution service of government data, and we would be at least as out of 
date as they are (because the process of verifying and inserting the data takes 
so time, as does the insertion in OpenStreetMap). 

If we still would decide to import this kind of assessment results, I would 
suggest to use keys which make it clear which criterion/system has been used 
(i.e. use specific keys for each source). While it may look similar on paper to 
a layman, it may be very different systems, or different practice of assigning 
risks even with the exact same system (but there’s no doubt that the actual 
systems/schemes are different).

Cheers Martin 
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