Re: [Marxism] Paper on Japanese nuclear reactors and earth quakes

[Bob Hopson <bobhpsn@xxxxxxxxx>]

Joachim writes:

"In France for instance, nuclear plants are designed
to withstand an earthquake twice as strong as the
1000-year event calculated for each site."

That's as far as I got reading because I know France
has more than fifty nuclear power plants. 

Divide the 1000 year event by 50, and you get that, on
average, a French nuclear power plant will face one of
those "freak" earthquakes every 20 years.
---------------------------------------------------

As is usual amongst Marxists on this list and
elsewhere, we are talking at cross purposes, probably
because we are all more concerned with scoring points
with our egos than getting at the truth, but that's an
argument for another time.

I'm not a statistician, but I've studied the math and
just wrote some code to calculate a Pearson
product-moment correlation coefficient, so here's 
my $.02:

Every nuclear reactor has some probability P that it
will have a catastrophic failure during its
operational lifetime.  That P will be differently for
each
plant, but (hopefully) is very small.  Joachim is
correct that the total probability of *any* failure is
the sum P(1) .. P(N)

However, that has little to do with the probability Q
of a major 1,000 year seismic event happing during the
lifetime of a given reactor *and* causing a
containment failure.  (I'm assuming that means that in
1,000 years there's a near certainty of an earthquake
of some big magnitude N happening in France, based on
what we know about the seismic history).  So every
reactor in France 
probably has roughly the same Q.  If such a quake
occured, it would be localized and unlikely to affect
more than 1 reactors, so you shouldn't just add up the
Q's -- that would suggest that building more nukes
means a big earthquake is *more likely* to happen,
which even the most anti-nuke advocates don't suggest,
but Joachim's arithmetic seems to be stating.

If the plant is actually designed to withstand such a
quake, as the Japanese plant basically did, than that
is lowering the plant's P, which is a good thing.

Joachim is basically right in that the more plants you
have, the more likely another big failure will occur
during the next few decades.  The question I find
interesting, which no one seems to be quantifying, is
how do the projected damages of global warming over
the next 100 years look like compared to the projected
damages of, say, one major nuclear accident every 50
years (here I'm assuming new genertion plants are much
better designs than TMI or Chernobyl)?  If a
arge-scale switch over from coal-burning plants to
fission plants occurs during the next 20-30 years,
what are the projected effects on global warming? 
Would it cause a significant reduction, would it
positively impact people's lives?  The nuclear
question is so emotionally
charged it doesn't seem like there's much interest in
comparing the risks.

BH



       
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