It is worse as you also have to consider the false negatives. Assume (for ease of calculation) that 1% of the publication are terrorists. Within a population of 1M there are 10,000 terrorists. Within that, 2% of terrorists will not be recognized. 200 terrorists are allowed to fly. Boom! It really doesn't matter what the real ratio of terrorists to non-terrorists is. What matters is the human costs of a false negative.
There is a cost to living in a free society-risk. If we create a situation where one false positive is worth preventing at any cost, then we won't have any freedom at the end of the day. Total panopticon and total control: No more possibility of getting rid of a regime if you have that. At some point, we as a society will have to say, we accept *some* risk, or we allow for a total police state.
The thing about nuclear accidents is that your senses can't be trusted. Radiation is invisible, and in low doses, not going to have immediate effect. Further information coming out about the NRC not enforcing its own safety guidelines, and the origins of the NRC itself give you a really great idea why people are freaked out. You can't engineer human systems to be human free, both in operation and in institution. Furthermore if you use a possibilistic approach to failure analysis instead of a probabilistic approach, you get a different prognosis. We haven't seen the worst nuclear accident, not even close. That's still in the future. It's a given. And that accident will have been caused by something the engineers didn't foresee and exacerbated by human systems or behavior. Why can't people understand THAT? You know how many times a once in a century accident has to happen to bring tragedy to thousands? Once.
I highly recommend the work of Charles Perrow in studying failure. Much better articulation of this subject than I can give.
I think taking into account the human factor when evaluating the tech is necessary. The fact is that in a capitalist society, profits being the driving factor, human institutions will push to gain short term profit over long term. This is particularly true in construction where construction cost is not considered alongside operating cost in many institutions, they are separate departments. This will mean that still working assets, while they may be increasingly risky to run, will be kept online past their safe lifetime. It means that people will delay enacting costly upgrades if they think they can possibly avoid it. They will, in short, gamble. I feel that this is often a shortcoming of engineers- they fail to engineer in the systems of the human institutions that will operate the tech.
Even when profit is not a concern, budgets are, and there are other factors to consider, for this example face-saving cultural issues. There are many hypothetically safe technologies I am sure, if they were operated perfectly to design spec after being built perfectly to design spec. But none of those hypothetical technologies will EVER not be run by human institutions at some level.
So being a person with a ZOMG nuke attitude is really much more sensible. Because you can never take the human out of the equation, EVER. So any technology's safety considerations should really have to be thought of in those terms. "Can this technology be used by incompetent idiots and if it all goes wrong will it be harmless?" That is the question we need to ask, not "Is this theoretically sound?"
I highly recommend reading Perrow's work called "Normal Accidents." It's a great book on this topic.
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It is worse as you also have to consider the false negatives. Assume (for ease of calculation) that 1% of the publication are terrorists. Within a population of 1M there are 10,000 terrorists. Within that, 2% of terrorists will not be recognized. 200 terrorists are allowed to fly. Boom! It really doesn't matter what the real ratio of terrorists to non-terrorists is. What matters is the human costs of a false negative.
There is a cost to living in a free society-risk. If we create a situation where one false positive is worth preventing at any cost, then we won't have any freedom at the end of the day. Total panopticon and total control: No more possibility of getting rid of a regime if you have that. At some point, we as a society will have to say, we accept *some* risk, or we allow for a total police state.
The thing about nuclear accidents is that your senses can't be trusted. Radiation is invisible, and in low doses, not going to have immediate effect. Further information coming out about the NRC not enforcing its own safety guidelines, and the origins of the NRC itself give you a really great idea why people are freaked out. You can't engineer human systems to be human free, both in operation and in institution. Furthermore if you use a possibilistic approach to failure analysis instead of a probabilistic approach, you get a different prognosis. We haven't seen the worst nuclear accident, not even close. That's still in the future. It's a given. And that accident will have been caused by something the engineers didn't foresee and exacerbated by human systems or behavior. Why can't people understand THAT? You know how many times a once in a century accident has to happen to bring tragedy to thousands? Once. I highly recommend the work of Charles Perrow in studying failure. Much better articulation of this subject than I can give.
I think taking into account the human factor when evaluating the tech is necessary. The fact is that in a capitalist society, profits being the driving factor, human institutions will push to gain short term profit over long term. This is particularly true in construction where construction cost is not considered alongside operating cost in many institutions, they are separate departments. This will mean that still working assets, while they may be increasingly risky to run, will be kept online past their safe lifetime. It means that people will delay enacting costly upgrades if they think they can possibly avoid it. They will, in short, gamble. I feel that this is often a shortcoming of engineers- they fail to engineer in the systems of the human institutions that will operate the tech. Even when profit is not a concern, budgets are, and there are other factors to consider, for this example face-saving cultural issues. There are many hypothetically safe technologies I am sure, if they were operated perfectly to design spec after being built perfectly to design spec. But none of those hypothetical technologies will EVER not be run by human institutions at some level. So being a person with a ZOMG nuke attitude is really much more sensible. Because you can never take the human out of the equation, EVER. So any technology's safety considerations should really have to be thought of in those terms. "Can this technology be used by incompetent idiots and if it all goes wrong will it be harmless?" That is the question we need to ask, not "Is this theoretically sound?" I highly recommend reading Perrow's work called "Normal Accidents." It's a great book on this topic.