Slashdot Mirror
The Panic Over Fukushima
An anonymous reader points out an article in the Wall Street Journal about how irrational fear of nuclear reactors made people worry much more about last year's incident at Fukushima than they should have. Quoting:
"Denver has particularly high natural radioactivity. It comes primarily from radioactive radon gas, emitted from tiny concentrations of uranium found in local granite. If you live there, you get, on average, an extra dose of .3 rem of radiation per year (on top of the .62 rem that the average American absorbs annually from various sources). A rem is the unit of measure used to gauge radiation damage to human tissue. ... Now consider the most famous victim of the March 2011 tsunami in Japan: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Two workers at the reactor were killed by the tsunami, which is believed to have been 50 feet high at the site. But over the following weeks and months, the fear grew that the ultimate victims of this damaged nuke would number in the thousands or tens of thousands. The 'hot spots' in Japan that frightened many people showed radiation at the level of .1 rem, a number quite small compared with the average excess dose that people happily live with in Denver. What explains the disparity? Why this enormous difference in what is considered an acceptable level of exposure to radiation?"
But over the following weeks and months, the fear grew that the ultimate victims of this damaged nuke would number in the thousands or tens of thousands. The 'hot spots' in Japan that frightened many people showed radiation at the level of .1 rem, a number quite small compared with the average excess dose that people happily live with in Denver. What explains the disparity? Why this enormous difference in what is considered an acceptable level of exposure to radiation?"
Because the government and the electrical utility had been completely opaque and not forthcoming with any useful information and preferred to treat the public like children and tell them to go pound sand at public meetings. The government's handling of this from the beginning was a textbook example of how to *not* handle something like this.
So what do people do when they can't get any valid information from their own government? Assume the government is covering it up and assume the worst. And there are plenty of people out there willing to fill the information void with the most outlandish "facts" going.
That's why.
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BMO
Radiation in Fukushima was manmade, and the inadequate safety features and inept management seem to be common problems with nuclear (and other) power plants.
Yeah, for definitions of "common" of perhaps one in a thousand.
Of course, coal plants kill people when working as intended, but it doesn't look scary on CNN, so nobody cares.
Mostly when they discovered to their embarrassment that the nearly arbitrary number they picked was less than the natural background and so wasn't attainable.
Which is exactly why it was created without a scale.
Far more generally, people fear sudden or unusual events far more than they fear regular smaller events, even if those regular smaller events add up to far more damage over time. The panic over such low levels of Fukushima radiation compared to Denver radiation may be an example of this. Another example is the panic in Dallas over the West Nile virus. The virus has killed 13-15 or so people this year, mostly the old and infirm. Guess what also kills the old in infirm? The regular flu. How many have been killed in Texas this year? No one knows, because the government doesn't bother to collect that information. The most recent information indicates some dozen children died of the flu in the 2010-2011 flu season in Texas. Numbers of adults and seniors aren't tracked and aren't available, but the CDC estimates somewhere between like 4000 and 30000 flu deaths a year, depending on the severity of that year's outbreak.
So, a dozen+ people die from something slightly unusual. Odds are pretty good that they all would have died from the flu in a few months anyway. But now the citizens and the government all in a panic to "do something" so they start aerial spraying of pesticides. How do you opt out of aerial spraying of pesticides where you live?
Car crashes, the flu, heart disease, cancer from Denver's background radiation - no one really cares. But risk or kill a small fraction of that number of people - but do it all at once and in some novel way - and people will react with exponentially higher fervor.
I think I saw someone on Slashdot once explain this as human instinct. Things that are unusual are more likely to get cave-man-proto-humans killed, so humans developed or evolved enhanced reactions to them. All I know is that we as a species are smart enough to overcome our instincts and react appropriately to situations, so we should do it in these types of situations, too.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
That ain't how it works. For the probabilities to multiply like that and provide redundancy, the vulnerabilities have to be independent events. Burning through O-rings isn't an independent event. A condition which causes one O-ring to leak and burn through (cold weather) is highly likely to affect subsequent O-rings. So you aren't really making things safer by adding an extra O-ring.
At Fukushima, it looks like they had a dozen or so backup generators on the theory that if one has a (say) 1 in 10 chance of failing, then the chance of all of them failing is 1 in 10^12. But nearly all of them were located in the same place, so a single event (a tsunami) which took out one generator took out all of them. Having multiple generators situated this way did not provide redundancy because they weren't vulnerable to independent events. They were vulnerable to the same event.
What they needed to do was put the generators in different locations, with different fuel sources, probably even different manufacturers and fuel types. That way an event which affected one would not affect the others, making their vulnerabilities independent events. The generators at reactors 5-6 were located further uphill, and thus survived the tsunami intact and were able to keep the fuel storage tanks there cooled.
Actually the WSJ article is by a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. And he is spot on about the huge mischaracterization of the risk assigned to nuclear power (including by insurance adjusters). People in general suck at rationally analyzing extremely rare events with huge consequences. For nuclear power, fear of another Chernobyl overwhelms the rational fact that historically it's the safest power source man has ever invented. For lotteries, the desire to hit the jackpot overwhelms the rational fact that nearly everyone who plays loses money, and even on average you lose money.