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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.
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.
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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.
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