Comment by ique | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ique | Hacker News Reader

This article seems thin on facts and big on sensations.

Two things strike me as pretty weird sentences in the article.

>Worst-case scenario builders consistently underestimate the statistical probability of separate bad things happening simultaneously

There must have been more than three accidents at nuclear plants in the history of mankind. Yet three "misjudgments" make them consistently wrong?

>Actually, ever major nuclear accident has been worse than worst case, and that's a fact

How can something be worse than worst case? I don't understand what the article tries to claim that "experts" have deemed the worst case. Clearly Fukushima is not worse than worst case as there haven't even been a full meltdown or anything like that yet.

Second, what is "Every major nuclear accident". Have there only been 3 major nuclear accidents? What constitutes major?

I interpret the "worse than worst case" as "What the designers thought was the worst case in reality was not" so we are now faced with a case that wasn't predicted and the outcome is unknown.

I can see the sense, this reactor was designed 50 years ago even with upgrades it's old technology and there have been huge improvements in the past 50 years. So this shows that the designers 50 years ago didn't do a perfect job. This is what the author means I believe.

And a "major nuclear accident" is defined as a level 7 accident in the International Nuclear Event Scale[1], I have no idea if the author refers to it when he talks about major nuclear events but probably not since there has been only one level 7 accident and that's Chernobyl.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sca...

I took it to mean he was talking about worst case disaster scenarios in general not just nuclear reactor related. The breaking of the levees in hurricane Katrina and the collapse of the world trade center come to mind. For example in the towers collapse the fire weakened the structural supports even though they were designed to withstand the impact.

> How can something be worse than worst case?

Easy, when anyone involved starts "giving 110%".

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