Inherent safety has been of great interest to regulators, process designers and investors. The idea behind this is that a process design is more economic when it is inherently safer. Inherent safety is known as the safety intrinsic to a process; the spirit of which is to mitigate hazards within the process It is also possible to achieve inherently safer design by diminishing the hazards in multi-component streams during process design. Hazards reduction during the design phase is a challenging task. A decrease in hazards in a process design not only improves process safety, but also protects the environment from potential impacts of the process. Current methodologies for risk assessment at the conceptual design stage of a chemical process need detailed process data, which is usually unavailable at such a phase. This paper presents simple new indices that require minimum data for risk evaluation of chemical processes at the conceptual design phase. The indices are applied to a hydrogenation case study to choose inherently safer designs among different alternatives. As an important result, total capacity of a process among other design array does not suffice for decision making unless the mass fraction of hazards in product streams are appreciably low. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.