The black swan, the white lies and the red herring: The story of nuclear power retold

The black swan, the white lies and the red herring: The story of nuclear power retold by admin_dianuke

E A S Sarma

Former Union Power Secretary, Govt of India

The black swan:

By any stretch of imagination, swans are always white, so it seemed, till the Dutch explorer, Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Western Australia in 1697.

Naseem Nicholas Taleb, in his thought provoking books, “Fooled By Randomness” (2004) and “The Black Swan” (2010), coined the term, the “black swan”, to describe any rare statistical outlier or a surprise, whose outcome is enormous but is usually ignored, till the event actually takes place and is rationalised by hindsight.when its full impact is suddenly felt.There cannot be a better term to describe the myth about the safety of nuclear power than this, though the “hindsight” part of it is still in short supply.

Even an amateur statistician will know that in a stochastic situation, an “average” can be highly deceptive and an outlier, however remotely probable it may be, can occur any time, including the next moment. It is the events hidden cosily by the tail of a normal probability distribution curve that should worry any genuine disaster manager; not the predictable area within the bell portion of the curve.The nuclear establishment and the regulators the world over seem to have deliberately closed their eyes to these low-probability, hugely disastrous events that can take place today, tomorrow or at any moment in the future. To say that such events will not occur will be statistically fallacious.

In the event of a nuclear accident, the risk of a meltdown in a reactor will be great because its consequences are potentially devastating; not only will they be extensive but also they will have adverse inter-generational genetic implications. How probable is the occurrence of such an accident? With all the statistical might at their beck and call, no regulator has ever been able to assess such a probability accurately! On the other hand, instead of mulling over their failure to assess the risk, the regulators, like the proverbial ostriches prefering to close their eyes to the harsh reality of the world, are erroneously trying to convince the people that a low-probability risk is no risk at all.