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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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It’s just hard to process low probablity, high impact events with common heuristics. It’s uncomfortable to mix a very low imprecise number with a very high imprecise number. You either approximate high impact to infinity and swear off nuclear or round off low probability to zero, seeing ‘the norm’ as what usually happens and the high impact event as an outlier. But this sort of scenario requires a norm reversal.

If an exploding nuclear plant releases more than all the routine radioactivity taken together, the ‘outlier’ is more significant than the ‘norm’. If you take a unit of radioactivity emitted by nuclear power at random, 99%+ it’s going to be from an uncontrolled discharge – routine operation radioactivity is irrelevant noise by comparison. Like it’s absurd to try to minimize terrorism in the US by calling 9/11 an ‘outlier’ – if you take a victim of terrorism at random, they’re likely from 9/11. If you care about impact, the small attacks are the outliers. If any data point should be shaved off for deviating from the norm, it’s them.

The problem with radioactivity is that it’s still not measuring impact, it just sounds scary. And coal plants have killed more people than nuclear plants with failures included.

Wouldn’t the rarity of the catastrophic failure matter as well? Other than 3 mile island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, I don’t think there’s been a catastrophic failure of a nuclear plant and we’ve had them for over 50 years. We’ve been using the technology for 18,000 days, or over a million hours with only a handful of failures. At some point the calculations would show an infinitesimal risk that could and probably should be neglected. We don’t include 9/11 type events in our calculations of building safety because the odds of a passenger jet hitting a building is small enough to neglect.

And if the question is generally is it safe, I think given the rarity of these events, we’re taking the release from a catastrophic failure and dividing it by the low odds (best guess one in a million) which is probably not as much as people think.

Wouldn’t the rarity of the catastrophic failure matter as well?

Which is why you do enough math to sanity-check the comparison. As I mentioned, Fukushima released more radioactivity than would be released by burning all the coal deposits on Earth. Nuclear power plants involve relevant amounts of radioactivity, coal plants don't. The fact that a release like Fukushima happened even once implies the odds aren't low enough to overcome the massive difference in radioactivity. Nuclear has plenty of advantages, and the risk of catastrophic failure is low enough that those other advantages might easily outweigh it, but being less of a radiation risk than coal is not one of them.

At some point the calculations would show an infinitesimal risk that could and probably should be neglected.

No. My point was, that number should never ever be rounded off to zero, despite our natural tendency to do so. That very very very small, extremely difficult to calculate probability, is the entirety of the problem for nuclear. Round something else up.

If it costs X dollars to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic failure by 1% and the same amount to reduce routine radioactivity by 50 %, then somewhat counterintuitively you should choose the former. And if all your efforts to stop terrorism focus on preventing ‘lone wolf’ type attacks, you are ignoring most of the problem. I think most of the anti-terrorism stuff would have been silly one way or the other, and I like nuclear, but this is just math.

I’ll agree — if you’re the engineering team. Then yes, I want you to make your plant as safe as can be done with the money and time available.

On the other hand, I think as far as public debates, or public policy, a less than one in a million chance is not worth debating and in fact quite often means nothing will get done at all because the chance of something bad happening is not and can never be zero. And if you’re debating whether or not to build a skyscraper, there’s no reason to include “it might get struck by an airplane and collapse” simply because that kind of failure is so rare that brining it up as a part of the debate on building one would skew the debate against even needed buildings or technology. It stagnates society.