> Finally, while I am not attacking nuclear power here, it is erroneous to reason about the relative safeties of technologies based purely on the historical track record.
I'm the one who made that argument.
That the safety systems failed points to the systemic flaw in Fukushima: it requires active safety. Better designs, such as those developed in the 40 years since Fukushima was started up, rely on the operation of physical laws to maintain safety in the event of a reactor emergency (edit: It's since been pointed out to me these only lengthen the window of reaction time, but do not remove the necessity to provide active cooling eventually).
It is not specious reasoning to point out that these designs would be even safer than a flawed design which has so far (with active management) survived an event far above its engineering specifications.
The problem with calculating unknown risks based on imaginable catastrophic consequences is that 1) the scope of imagination is large and 2) interested parties to the estimate can skew it up or down. The best known example of this problem is Pascal's Wager.
Comments
> Finally, while I am not attacking nuclear power here, it is erroneous to reason about the relative safeties of technologies based purely on the historical track record.
I'm the one who made that argument.
That the safety systems failed points to the systemic flaw in Fukushima: it requires active safety. Better designs, such as those developed in the 40 years since Fukushima was started up, rely on the operation of physical laws to maintain safety in the event of a reactor emergency (edit: It's since been pointed out to me these only lengthen the window of reaction time, but do not remove the necessity to provide active cooling eventually).
It is not specious reasoning to point out that these designs would be even safer than a flawed design which has so far (with active management) survived an event far above its engineering specifications.
The problem with calculating unknown risks based on imaginable catastrophic consequences is that 1) the scope of imagination is large and 2) interested parties to the estimate can skew it up or down. The best known example of this problem is Pascal's Wager.