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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. This whole chart is irrelevant because what we care about is the expected impact on our health in the future, not the impact on our health in the past.

This is why all those people who say we shouldn't decide what to do about building more nuclear power plants until the events in Japan have stabilized are dumb, because the outcome in Japan has zero impact on expected future outcomes.

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"because the outcome in Japan has zero impact on expected future outcomes."

Huh? Expected future outcomes are based on assumptions. Japan gives real data that we should use to recheck those assumptions, and we may learn that some of them were wrong.

It gives data about reactors that are, as I recall, 40 years old. That's entirely irrelevant to the designs of newer reactors.

I am pretty sure people in Japan had nevertheless been told those reactors are safe. They will be told new reactors are safe. Why should they believe it now? If you don't count it as a data point about safety of reactors, count it as a data point about the reliability of engineers and governments.

not if the new reactors made the same assumptions. Are you suggesting that it isn't possible, or highly unlikely, that we'll learn anything worthwhile to improve reactor design in the future from this disaster?

Yeah, more or less. We're learning more about what happens when it fails, but it's an old reactor, and we've seen them fail before. We also seem quite unlikely to learn anything especially revolutionary about how radioactive materials behave.

"We also seem quite unlikely to learn anything especially revolutionary about how radioactive materials behave."

But that's not what we need to learn about. We need to learn about how the systems that are supposed to contain radioactive materials stand up to major catastrophe.

The outcome in Japan may have no impact on the statistics, but it will have a massive impact on the opinons and beliefs of the human decision makers. Waiting for it to resolve will allow calmer heads to prevail.

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