🚀 go-pugleaf

"D.A.Kopf" <dak@dakx.com> wrote in message
news:393D6C16.AB65AC41@dakx.com...
> Donald Borowski wrote:
> >
<snip>

> However, it seems
> reasonable to me that individual risk-taking should not imperil the lives
of
> others. Criminal law seems to agree, by allowing punishment for
involuntary
> manslaughter. If I fell off a roof onto someone, well, I'm bound to say
I'd
> feel responsible for their injury. If a nuke that I designed had an
accident
> that caused injuries, I'd feel uncomfortable arguing that I'm not
reponsible
> becaused I used accepted engineering standards.

This is a quandary of any industrialized society.  Substitute "chemical
plant", "gas flares", "car", "toaster", or "space shuttle" for "nuke", and
you'll see what I mean.  Pretty much all engineered items carry a risk, and
that's OK if society decides they're worth it.

By the way, the formula used to evaluate risk is:

Risk = Probability x Consequences

An airplane flight, for instance, is low-risk, even though the consequences
of an accident are drastic--because the probability of an accident is very
low.  Roofing (to amuse wmbjk) is relatively high-risk, because both
probability and consequences are significant.

Now, by this measure, nuclear energy is low-risk (if we're talking about
LWR's and CANDU's).  Anti-nuclear advocates get a long way by stating the
_consequences_ of a nuclear accident, while ignoring the probability of one.
One Canadian group quoted verbatim from an AECB report about the possible
consequences of an accident during transportation of MOX fuel in Canada
(AECB is our nuclear regulatory body).  Unfortunately, the anti-nukes
ignored all the qualifiers; for instance, the containers (made of black-box
material) would have to be completely vaporized in a truck explosion,
releasing all the plutonium into the air, within a short distance of an
urban centre, with a strong wind blowing directly towards the centre, during
a temperature inversion (to keep the smoke plume close to the ground),
assuming that no evacuation measures were taken, and that everyone inhaled
enough plutonium to cause cancer within 10-40 years.  They also neglected to
quote the report's estimate of the probability of such an accident:  I
believe it was 1x10^-9, or one in a billion, though how they got THAT
number.... I can dig up the reference if anyone's interested.

Whew.