Fail Safe Part II

Aeschylus Was His Name...

I've been arguing a lot about the inferences that can be drawn from the Fukushima plant going into meltdown and a category 6 disaster in the wake of 12m high waves as well as a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. What I find most annoying is the group of anti-nuclear types citing that given the failure of Fukushima, it conclusively proves nuclear power should never be used. I've pointed out that there is an epistemological problem with risk management in my previous post here.

The people saying that Fukushima proves nuclear power plants cannot be safe are ignoring the freakishness of events that befell the plant to send it into its current condition. And this is is what I have for you.

Aeschylus was a playwright. He famously - and apocryphally - died when he was sitting in a forest reading a book when he was hit on the head with a turtle that was dropped by an eagle.

It's exactly that sort of freakishness that led to the events at Fukushima; the off the charts unlikelihood of a series of events overcoming all the fail safes. So if we were going to argue that Fukushima does indeed *prove* nuclear power is an unacceptable risk, then we have to draw the same inference and say that the death of Aeschylus proves sitting in the forest reading a book is an unacceptable risk.

People sit in the forests all the time. They don't get killed by eagles dropping turtles. There are around 2000 reactors around the planet safely supplying power, day in, day out. If we use Fukushima as the yardstick and make all nuclear power generation unacceptable, it would be like making Aeschylus' death the reason why we can't sit and read books in a forest. It's like taking the most outlier statistical abnormality and claiming it should occupy the middle.

Again, I'm not pro-nukes. I find radio-activity and human error and fallibility to be frightening risks. But I can't stand listening to people expressing their fears of nuclear power using the Fukushima disaster as the conclusive reason why we should stop all nuclear power stations. It's the worst kind of opportunism and it is inherently unscientific.