Dr. John Downer write on the fallacy of probabilistic risk assessment
Read the latest paper by Dr. John Downer on the fallacy of probabilistic risk assessment, found in the journal “Regulation and Governance, 2013”
Disowning Fukushima: Managing the credibility of nuclear reliability assessment in the wake of disaster
From chapter 2:
The first thing to note about the Fukushima disaster (henceforth referred to as “Fukushima”) is that it was unexpected. And not just in a specific sense – nobody ever expects a specific nuclear plant to melt down on any given day – but in the much more foundational sense that nobody expects any nuclear plants to melt down.
To understand this distinction, consider the realm of civil aviation. In this realm we understand that airplanes very occasionally, but nevertheless routinely, crash, even though any specific crash is always unexpected. We accept such accidents as an inevitable cost of the technology and we anticipate them in our plans and institutions. The same logic does not hold in the nuclear sphere, however. Reactors, in this respect, are more comparable to dams or bridges, in that public decisions about them are predicated on an understanding that the chance of them failing catastrophically is so low as to be negli- gible. Modern democracies, we might say, are institutionally blind to the possibility of nuclear meltdowns.
READ THE FULL PAPER:
