The Chances of Another Chernobyl Before 2050? 50%, Say Safety Specialists

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/536886/the-chances-of-another-chernobyl-before-2050-50-say-safety-specialists/

[font face=Serif]Emerging Technology From the arXiv
April 17, 2015

[font size=5]The Chances of Another Chernobyl Before 2050? 50%, Say Safety Specialists[/font]

[font size=4]And there’s a 50:50 chance of a Three Mile Island-scale disaster in the next 10 years, according to the largest statistical analysis of nuclear accidents ever undertaken.[/font]



[font size=3]The catastrophic disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima are among the worst humankind has had to deal with. Both were the result of the inability of scientists and engineers to foresee how seemingly small problems can snowball into disasters of almost unimaginable scale.

Given that most countries with nuclear power intend to keep their reactors running and that many new reactors are planned, an important goal is to better understand the nature of risk in the nuclear industry. What, for example, is the likelihood of another Chernobyl in the next few years?

Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Spencer Wheatley and Didier Sornette at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and Benjamin Sovacool at Aarhus University in Denmark. These guys have compiled the most comprehensive list of nuclear accidents ever created and used it to calculate the likelihood of other accidents in future.

Their worrying conclusion is that the chances are 50:50 that a major nuclear disaster will occur somewhere in the world before 2050. “There is a 50 per cent chance that a Chernobyl event (or larger) occurs in the next 27 years,” they conclude.

…[/font][/font]

[Demeter]

1. Ah, no. The scientists and engineers could foresee the problems just fine

But they aren't the Deciders.

It's the Bean Counters, the Profiteers, that make the safety decisions to "cut this" and "cheapen that" and "eliminate safeguards". With sufficient lying, and payoffs to the politicians and the press, bad things happen.

Too many times the REAL Crooks pass the blame off on the technical staff, but it isn't so. (Disclosure: I'm an engineer by training and genetics from a long line of the technically gifted. I have seen this blame-shifting in my own life, and that of my family)

After all, do you ever hear of GOOD things happening "accidentally"? Only when the Profiteers, crooked Politicians, and paid-off Press don't have a finger in the pie....and the People, the engineers and the scientists get to make the decisions.

[MisterP]

4. that's why they had to build up a hippie-punching ideological atmosphere

science's dirty cops
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Council_on_Science_and_Health

[Mnemosyne]

2. Too late. nt

[bananas]

5. "or larger"

I'll have to look at this later.

[kristopher]

6. Explanation of chart

Figure 3: The annual observed frequencies, computed for 2 year periods, are given by the solid dots
with standard errors. The standard errors are computed assuming that the counts follow a Poisson
process: Var(λt) = λt . The solid lines and standard errors are the Poisson GLM regressions (eq. 2), vt
of the annual frequencies, from 1970 until Chernobyl (April 1986), and from Chernobyl until 2014. The dark green volume is the standard error of the GLM Poisson regression. The larger lighter green volume is the same but for a Negative Binomial distribution (e.g., see [28]) rather than the Poisson. This somewhat better captures the variation in annual frequencies, however for simplicity we retain the Poisson model. Capturing about 60 percent of observed frequencies within 1 standard error indicates that these models are both reasonable.

Study available here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.02380v1.pdf

[mackdaddy]

7. Well, that cleared it right up.....

[1handclapn]

8. Fukushima has already released more radiation than Chernobyl

they don't know how deep reactors 1 thru 4 have china-syndromed into the earth.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/28-signs-that-the-west-coast-is-being-absolutely-fried-with-nuclear-radiation-from-fukushima/5355280

[Nihil]

9. Go back to sleep ...

> they don't know how deep reactors 1 thru 4 have china-syndromed into the earth.


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[miyazaki]

10. You mean the Falklands Syndrome

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/01/falklands_syndrome_fukushima_meltdown_to_cause_10000_chernobyls_in_south_atlantic/

[NickB79]

11. They've already removed a significant number of fuel rods since the meltdown

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/world/asia/fuel-rods-are-removed-from-japans-damaged-fukushima-reactor.html?_r=0

TOKYO — The cleanup of Japan’s devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant crossed an important milestone on Saturday when the plant’s operator announced it had safely removed the radioactive fuel from the most vulnerable of the four heavily damaged reactor buildings.

The operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, removed the last remaining fuel rods from the ruined No. 4 reactor building, putting the rods inside a large white container for transportation to another, undamaged storage pool elsewhere on the plant’s grounds. The company, known as Tepco, had put a high priority on removing the No. 4 unit’s some 1,500 fuel rods because they sat in a largely unprotected storage pool on an upper floor of the building, which had been gutted by a powerful hydrogen explosion during the March 2011 accident.