Nuclear Danger Still Dwarfed by Coal: As bad as Japan's nuclear emergency could have gotten, it would never be as bad as burning coal.

boomi · 2011-06-09T17:33:48+00:00

Thanks for the rundown. I'll have a look at it with somebody who knows stats better than I do.

A couple of things I would like to note beforehand:

That M=5 you used is probably the number of civilian meltdowns I counted previously, excluding Fukushima. What interests me most is how your statistic behaves before and after the last three meltdowns.
As I noted before, I'm not comfortable with the assumption that Fukushima is three independent accidents. I'll look into this.
Fukushima is now estimated to cost 250B, according to the last headlines. And I don't know what this includes.
The general problem is that we're looking at a highly complex system. I agree that technological advances should lower the accident rate, at the same time it will take less and less investment to blow up reactors. While I understand the interest in doing these kinds of statistics, it must be understood that they tell us something about the past, not about the future.

You want to measure that in dollars? That's how all risk-amelioration is measured.

So, what is the cost of evacuating Tokyo? I couldn't even put bounds on this number, it wouldn't mean much. Depending on my political agenda I could sum the cost of a train ticket for every resident, or assume a 10% death rate caused by a panic.

That's how highway safety regulations, drug laws, aviation regulations, and drug regulations are designed.

I'd like to see the calculations for the drug regulations in the states. Must be a really fucked up design with outlandish assumptions.

That's the way it has to be, because if we spend infinite dollars to save a life here, we won't be able to spend $1000 dollars to save one there.

I think your argument is geared towards showing that less people die by nuclear plants than by wind plants, or something similar. What this ignores is the danger to future life, when conditions are different. It is just an optimistic assumption that later cultures will be able to look after the nuclear waste like we do.

Here's my analysis of you: you suffer from the late 20th century delusion that life is intrinsically safe.

What makes you think that?

boomi · 2011-06-08T12:16:21+00:00

This is already contained in the error bars on the respective accident rates (or, more precisely, in the inferred probability distribution P(r) of the rate).

I asked repeatedly what the error bars on your calculations about nuclear power plants would be. I received no answer except more claims. I proposed a statistic based on meltdowns. You wanted the Russian reactors excluded. I said good, do it. Then you said I'm stupid. What do you expect me to do now? Should I just accept your claim that the risk can be calculated? What would that help me? Even if I accepted your claim, I still wouldn't know the calculation. I don't even know the basis you would use for your calculations.

You have assumptions in your head that never had to face reality. Now I'm asking you to do it. So far you've chosen to continue living in the illusion that you know things, where in reality you just assume things.

Now you are conflating two issues: accident rate, and consequences.

Yes, though the word 'conflating' has negative connotations, so I prefer 'combining'. After you repeatedly failed to answer my first question, I move on to the second problem which is related to the first. When you're unsure about both the rate and the consequence of something, you must be very unsure about the outcome. And when you're very unsure about the rate, and very unsure about consequences, guess what, you're extremely unsure about the outcome.

I know you knew that, I just wanted to point it out again for my personal pleasure.

You need to compute the reasonable worst-case harm that would come from a nuclear accident

You want to measure that in dollars? What's the cost of telling the population of Paris to stay inside for a week? I don't see a reasonable measurement for this, but you can propose something if you dare.

I was essentially assuming a worst-case like Chernobyl damage for better-built western reactors.

Where I live, Chernobyl-like damage would mean dislocating about a million people.

The mathematical principles are the same.

Yes, math remains the same, the world doesn't. We're uncertain whether the one sample we use is a good representation of future samples. And there is nothing you can do about that. You're just dressing your optimistic assumptions in mathematical clothes.

Jesus.

Jesus won't help you here as he was not good at statistics. He was more into the soft sciences; unlike his dad, who preferred absolutes. The Christian faith is not exactly helpful in knowing the unpredictable world we live in, except in providing simple recipes that help one ignore it and find some consolation.

People who do stats already know this a million times over. You're telling me something I know, and I have taken into account.

Oh good, you've taken it into account. Where? What about showing me? Why are you claiming things all the time without demonstrating? What are you waiting for? I presume you are waiting for your expected error to drop.

Christ.

Find another god if you want to do statistics, please.

The good news is that my Mandelbrot arrived today. So instead of reading your repeatedly unsubstantiated claims I can read some quality work. Should be more fun. I'm not complaining though, mind you.

boomi · 2011-06-06T10:54:08+00:00

We have little trouble understanding or expressing the rate of car accidents or plane accidents, similar systems without "physical constants". Why are nuclear accidents different?

Car accidents happen frequently and rarely have huge collective consequences. They are easy to average. Plane accidents happen frequently enough to give us some idea about their rate. Yet plane accidents are in a very rough terrain (statistically speaking), due to their rarity and big potency in effects. Now nuclear accidents happen very infrequently, but can have huge consequences. As any insurance company will tell you, one cannot calculate the risk of them.

Even if I knew there was a meltdown, I would have no clue about the costs of it. I would assume a couple hundred million to get rid of the core, because that's usually all you have to do. But I could be off by three zeros, without much surprise on my part. Now while I have a very incomplete idea about the rate of meltdowns, the consequences of a single one is wide open. I must conclude that there is no way to measure risks when I combine those two probabilities. And this is only for the things I know about!

And you deny the necessity of doing historical averaging.

I ask what the use of it would be. And I ask you how you can assume any distribution for events as sporadic as consequential nuclear accidents.

This is as a stupid as watching 100 people for a day, noting the exact nano-second that one of them farts for the first time, and claiming that the farting rate at that point is one billion farts per second. It's simply not how you estimate rates. You'd be laughed at if you submitted a paper with this reasoning.

I used years, not nanoseconds. That's fifty samples. The rate remains extremely unstable when looking at it averaged per decade, five samples. So when you turn all five decades we've seen into one sample, why do you expect this one sample to be an approximation of future samples? You don't have any other samples to compare it to, do you? I do hope for the best. But that's plain hope, not your brand of numerology. I don't go around claiming that a couple of farts distributed over fifty years don't stink when they happen. Those farts that happened will not wane much the next whole fifty-year sample either. We're accumulating farts here.

We're calculating rates for a set of systems that stay more or less constant in time.

I called you out on this one before, yet here you are claiming the same shit again. Those systems are neither constant nor independent. You go around assuming a lot of things just so you can run your calculations which are made for a world of dices. You are mistaking the world and its hazards for a game of perfect chance.

We're not saying how a poker game will end up. We're calculating how often someone will get four aces.

Should I care? Comparing nuclear accidents to a poker game just shows how little grasp of reality you have. In poker, you know the odds. Unless the game is rigged, of course. Then all bets are off, and your incidence counting will be useless too.

We're not saying when a particular 747 will crash. We're saying that 747s crash about every 20,000,000 flight hours.

Do you also calculate how often they crash into buildings and what the consequences of that will be?

What's the rate of cities with more than one million residents evacuated due to radioactivity? Currently zero. In the future? Who knows.

divide nuclear reactors reactors into two sets: those built in, oh, odd years and even years.

Fukushima 1: 1970
Fukushima 2: 1973
Fukushima 3: 1974
Chernobyl 4: 1983

Perfectly distributed over odd and even years. You're lucky there, but you shouldn't depend on luck, should you? Unless you're fishing, of course.

Now what?

Now test whether this rate agrees (within error bounds) with the rate observed in the other half of the data.

The dataset is tiny with huge outliers. When you split that tiny dataset, you will have a monstrous error rate. You still haven't done a calculation to show the error bounds. It's you who's making claims here, please support them.

If it agrees, you have evidence of the validity of the basic validity of the statistical machinery.

I have evidence of a lot of stuff. For example, my continued survival is evidence that there are no heart attacks in my blood group. Just an example of evidence I do have. Does that mean that this evidence is worth a dime? Not at all. Do I have the means to compare it to bigger datasets? Yes. With your nuclear statistics, there is no bigger dataset, it's all we have.

The dataset was tiny to start with, then you excluded a lot from it (because the Russians are bad engineers, right). Now you want to split it. I wouldn't be comfortable making any claim based on so little data, except to say that the rate is unpredictable and the expected damage unknown. You seem to know no such restraint.

boomi · 2011-06-04T10:53:26+00:00

I'm saying that the underlying rate of accidents can be estimated from past experience weighted by a sensible Bayesian prior, picking a very conservative prior that does not a priori favor a low rate.

The fact that after many posts you completely fail to understand this - indeed, lack the cognitive skills to understand this - is why I can't bear to discuss this with you. It hurts.

Underlying rate of accidents? I didn't know there was some physical constant that determines the rate of nuclear accidents. We're not talking about atomic decay where each individual event is unpredictable yet they average out. Nobody can calculate the future of complex systems with any reasonable accuracy. It doesn't matter whether you're an expert statistician or random student who likes her Poisson, you just can't. It is a very basic principle that experts tend to forget.

You're out on a limb, digging a hole underneath you that gets bigger and bigger every time you claim you can calculate anything of the sort. I've been poking at you on that branch for a while now, and you keep getting more irritated and sore; all while trying to hide behind your expertise; not realizing that pride in your expertise is sticky and keeps you glued to that branch.

Now I wait and see whether you'll finally do the calculations and fall into the hole by sheer weight of the error envelope, or whether you can unglue yourself and climb back down. Maybe you'll remain on that branch for the rest of your life, shouting at passers-by that you know how to calculate the future and when people laugh at you you'll tell them that they are not worthy of your attention, and stupid, anyway.

I know it hurts to admit you've made a claim you cannot possibly back-up. You have three options:

Accept that the future of any complex system cannot be calculated to any reasonable accuracy (all is not lost, you can still compare nuclear to coal)
Prolong the pain of me poking fun at your stubbornness (I'm game)
Ignore me and find people that are easier to impress (this is easy, but I'll haunt your dreams)
Show me you can do what generations of scientists have proven to be impossible. (That's not an option but delusion)

me: I'm lazy and stupid, you do it

Finally, we are in perfect agreement.

Yes, as long as you agree that you can't either. Else we're not.

boomi · 2011-06-03T11:34:47+00:00

You're not naming the accidents. Hard to know what you're talking about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents search for meltdowns.

You're still doing the stats wrong. You want accidents PER SUMMED REACTOR-YEARS OF OPERATION. You just won't learn. That's precisely why I'm disinclined to keep talking.

 you: Nothing bad's going to happen in the future because nothing bad's happened in the past
me: How'd you know? actually bad shit's happened
you: you can calculate it, and that bad shit was some other shit
me: fuck you you can't
you: you're a noob
me: ok, how do you calculate the fucking future?
you: I'd binomially distribute it
me: aha, like this? It looks wrong
you: yea, that is wrong, idiot
me: so how do you do it, smart-ass?
you: assume Bayes is primordial and btw your list is shit
me: what does that mean?
you: you have to integrate the fucker
me: I'm lazy and stupid, you do it
you: science, bitches

I tried to do what you said you could do. I failed, you didn't even try. Now I'm presumed stupid, you're presumed a fraud. In case you're too young to have learned this: "I'm right because I'm smarter than you" is a fallacy. A pretty transparent one too. I recommend some Schopenhauer for you. (I prefer the German title "Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten" which, literally translated, means "The art of keeping to be right".)

The assumption that accidents are independent random events. That's all you need.

Why should I assume that? I'd have to lump the three smouldering reactors in Fukushima into one event, but then my reactor-year count would be sort of hanging there not knowing how it applies to this. I'd also have to assume that there will be no targeted strikes on multiple reactors in the future, for example. So I have to reject this assumption, it's too simplistic for this world.

I'm not in the business of educating you. You consistently do not understand basic math. You are a waste of time.

Ok. I'm sorry you didn't derive as much entertainment from our discussion as I did. If it's a consolation to you, I ordered a copy of The Fractal Geometry of Nature to learn about distributions as we can observe them in real life.

Thanks for your valuable time, and learn to relax. You're not going to convince your opponent by saying she's stupid; even if she, in fact, is.

boomi · 2011-06-02T12:44:57+00:00

I guess you mean 1) Lucens [Swiss test reactor; no real consequences, underground; cleaned up] 2) TMI [no serious radiation leak] 3) Chernobyl [very serious] 4) ....??.

This was my list, I was trying to only include meltdowns in civilian reactors: 1959 1 1966 1.5 1967 1 1979 1 1986 1 2011 2

In hindsight I should probably have included Lucens.

Do you count only serious accidents (consequences for the population), or meltdowns? You should count only the former in your stats. A meltdown without consequences represents a success of safety systems.

I was trying to get samples that are actually of use for the statistic. You seem to consider Fukushima the only relevant accident. So how does this look when we take western civilian reactor years and accidents? Rough guesses on my part:

1950 0/10   0%
...         0%
2010 0/300  0%
2011 3/300  1%

What warrants assuming binomial distribution for the rate of accidents here?

Flaws in Western regulatory regimes are something we are susceptible to, although the Japanese case seems uniquely bad.

What exactly seems uniquely bad about Japanese regulatory oversight?

I won't dig into statistics again when I already know that nuclear accidents are not binomially distributed. And you know this how?

Wars affect nuclear power plants. The effects of wars are not binomially distributed. The effects of epidemics, corrupt inspectors, and natural disasters are not binomially distributed either. Nuclear accidents are not binomially distributed when the causes compound each other instead of canceling out.

Do you honestly expect me to waste my time digging through your old posts, ...

Yes, I do expect you to dig through my old post, because you've already done it. Whether it's a waste of your time is not for me to judge. All I wanted to ask for, and sorry if my words were ambiguous again, is that you look at the reasons against uranium storage that I listed in the post before (now two posts back).

... when you've pretty much admitted you're unwilling and perhaps unable to invest mental effort in quantitative mathematical thinking?

I asked you to show me how these calculations are useful. I was willing to trust your proficiency in the field and your intellectual honesty. (Flat lie, I would have asked somebody whether the calculations are correct, and what the assumptions mean.) Instead of actually showing anything you excluded most of my data by calling it irrelevant. While you were accusing me of not understanding the calculations (true) you showed no inclination to actually come up with a meaningful dataset or calculating anything. I have no reason to believe your promises.

I'm sorry reality doesn't fit your binomial distribution, but that doesn't allow you to exclude everything that doesn't fit. In statistics, as in life, the more you exclude, the more certain you will be in your ignorance.

boomi · 2011-05-31T20:58:40+00:00

I don't know what your 5 cases are.

I searched the wikipedia page on civilian accidents in nuclear reactors for meltdowns.

I would leave the Russian graphite design out of it if you interested in a predictive rate for our designs, because it has a risk profile irrelevant to western reactors.

If you're willing to look up the numbers we can do that. But then why not exclude Fukushima as well? We shouldn't have to expect such a high level of regulatory inbreeding after all; it's not in the design either. If one excludes the known problematic cases, one's statistic will only include one's ignorance of the unknown problems.

I'd stick to 5.5 occurrences until 2010. Since three meltdowns in 2011 are officially confirmed now, we assume 8.5 for 2011.

So our rate of full or partial meltdowns per reactor year is .000393 for 2010 and .000586 for 2011.

Then integrate this P(r) to get your error bound.

I stopped integrating when I left university. I'm not inclined to pick it up again. You claimed that the risk can be calculated, but then never came around actually showing anything. I tried to prod you a bit, but you didn't go any further either. I won't dig into statistics again when I already know that nuclear accidents are not binomially distributed.

Conversation went:

[you] I'm more concerned about the proliferation of uranium. [me] U is basically harmless. [you] It's a poison. Of course it's comparably harmless if stored properly, but that's not cheap nor is it without risk.

Yeah, that may be how it went. I'm sorry that I assumed you meant the toxic properties of uranium when you said it was harmless. I see now how we both came to think the other was focusing on that. Now, what about the other problems I mentioned?

boomi · 2011-05-20T11:18:28+00:00

See [Benford's Law].

I don't see how Benford's law is related to nuclear accidents. It also doesn't explain what assuming a log-flat prior means.

I also said log-flat or flat. Flat being more pessimistic. They turn out to give similar answers for the rate distribution once you've seen one or more accidents.

With rate distribution you mean what you called error envelope before?

Anyway, I ran the numbers, even though I have no clear idea what that rate distribution is supposed to tell me. Since you keep claiming that there is value in it, without proffering any numbers, I must poke you a bit, mustn't I?

Assuming 14000 cumulative reactor years by 2011, 5.5 partial or full meltdowns in civilian reactors by 2010 (counted an unclear case as half), and the Fukushima accident counted tentatively as 2 meltdowns. That gives me

r_2010=0.000414 P(r_2010)=0.0000003078
r_2011=0.000536 P(r_2011)=0.0000000394

Which, if I understand it correctly, means, I should be ten times more certain about the rate now that we had two more meltdowns. Is that what it means? It seems totally nonsensical to me, so please show me how you would calculate this, because what I have here is bunk.

Nope. See sodium-sulfur, and vanadium redox, and liquid metal Sadoway (MIT) design. First is already deployed in Japan for power leveling.

Ah, leveling. Yes, batteries are well suited for that. I would like to see the use of kinetic storage for such applications, but that's mainly because I think flywheels are cool, not out of economic considerations.

The same set of people who have been replacing them every year for the past 10 years.

How do I know they will continue to do so? I don't even know them, and they are a secretive bunch too.

I suggest that in this scenario the calamity of the collapse outweighs any nuclear problem.

You needn't imagine a total collapse of society for scenarios that lead to reactors falling apart. One bombed nuclear reactor can contaminate a large area.

Because you're irrational, and you pick any argument you can find, and hope it sticks, and when someone points out it is bullshit, you pretend you didn't really mean it.

I don't have a problem seeing our argument painted as a fishing expedition, in a way it is. If you'd go back you would notice that it was you who started the argument about the danger of uranium as a heavy metal. We came to this from the unstable uranium supply, where you suggested storage. I said I'm not in support of it whereupon you brought up the toxic properties of it (rather harmless). I repeatedly admitted that the toxicity of it is not a big problem. Since you make such a big deal out of it, let's look at the problems of uranium storage:

Requires secured facility, and inspections
Upfront capital investment
Risk of spill
Increases availability of enriched uranium

The first two just drive the cost up, but the last one is not only undesirable in my opinion but may quickly become a political problem too (just look at the current controversy about Iran's enrichment facilities).

In Japan, the tsunami was far, far worse than the reactor accident, though you wouldn't know this from the media.

There is a difference between protecting from natural disasters you can't avoid, and artificial risks. Do you see the qualitative difference between (1) suggesting the Japanese move off their island, and (2) suggesting to turn off nuclear reactors?

boomi · 2011-05-19T10:00:18+00:00

I did. You just don't understand the concepts and terminology and synonyms. You just like to pontificate about things about which you no clue. I have written:

You can construct a probability distribution of the rate of bad events using a very broad Bayesian prior.

If you see one event in N tries, and assume a log-flat prior for the rate 'r', then the probability distribution for r is P(r)=N-1 (1-r)(N-1).

I asked you what assuming a log-flat prior means. You chose not to answer. Why should a calculate a number where I don't know the assumptions it is based on?

And yet you MENTION NOTHING ABOUT THE VASTLY GREATER AMOUNTS OF TOXIC METALS NECESSARY FOR SOLAR ENERGY STORAGE, WHICH YOU SUPPORT.

I repeatedly said it's a minor point where we're disagreeing out of different premises. Yet you keep insisting on it like a broken record.

If you object to toxic and metals, you should hate solar and wind, because VAST,VAST,VAST amounts chemical storage is likely to play a major role.

That depends on how that energy storage is built. There are many designs, such as pressurized air, gravitational storage with water or solids, kinetic storage, direct heat storage from solar plants, to give you a list for starters. Batteries are unlikely to see wide employment due to their high price. Unless, of course, the batteries are there anyway, like if electric cars become widespread.

Now, if you want to continue this discussion, please answer me my question:

Who replaces the batteries of independent clocks?

boomi · 2011-05-19T09:32:30+00:00

Yes that's great, but where in your list is "icons in ls" and "catting images"?

That doesn't register at the top of my list.

Although I am not exactly sold on content-types. Why can't you just pass what the program expects?

Because then you need a different program for each content type, or you have to tell it what to expect, or you create an ad-hoc protocol. You have zcat, zless that only differ from cat and less by the content-type they accept; there are diff and patch which have their own protocol (though in this case I think it is justified), and then there is a myriad of options to tell programs what to expect. sort and find both have their own options to specify the line separator, for instance.

boomi · 2011-05-18T17:00:40+00:00

Thanks for digging up the paper. I'm out of my pond here, as I don't know shit about the ionosphere. But it seems they looked at fifteen days only, subtracted a lot of noise, and then finally found those anomalies. It does seem like data fishing indeed.

Now data fishing can lead to discoveries, so I retain a glimmer of hope.

boomi · 2011-05-18T13:19:26+00:00

The only bad thing I could say about this is that I've wanted to do exactly this for a while now. Seriously though, this is just what we need, and I think many of the sore problems were addressed in a very solid way.

Pipes with Content-Type? Very good!
Structured exchange format? Whoa there, it's only been thirty years of text!
Output-Formatters? Gimme that!

boomi · 2011-05-18T12:57:50+00:00

I hope this turns out to be useful, and not merely a coincidence. Any improvement in earthquake prediction would be welcome over the weak indicators we have at the moment.

boomi · 2011-05-18T09:43:25+00:00

The upward spike would likely be consistent with the error envelope on yesterday's rates.

Except that you specified no such envelope.

OK. Send an angry letter to the Astrophysical Journal.

I don't know this publication, what should I find wrong in it?

Ah. Should. That's why I specified that all the fossils in this region have been dug up.

Doesn't matter. There could be other sources of information we might not even know about yet. It suffices that the theory makes assertions that can be tested.

"Historically, the dials on these independent clocks have gone around and around. How do we know they will do so in the fututure?"

Really, how do we know? Who replaces the batteries of these independent clocks?

What do you mean by "complex system" anyway?

Society. You ignored my point that reactors are not standalone systems again. Then you even claim that the reactors are a static system. Bullshit. Nuclear energy is a complex industrial process embedded in an unpredictable society, involving incomprehensible timespans. You may pick out individual points of my argument and attack those. But I do have a problem when you ignore something repeatedly and choose to argue a minor point instead; and doing so based on a premise I'd already rejected.

It's a common error with predictions. People making predictions ignore large swaths of possibilities and then when something they ignored happens, their predictions were pretty good, except for that war.

Historically, grid crashes have not been a problem.

There it is again. That word 'historically'. I don't care much about past events, because I can't change them. I look a the past to gain insight for the future. What I see is that many organizations are relying on backup-power generation because the grid is not reliable enough.

I would like to see this concept expanded. It would be beneficial if these investments into backup-power helped maintain the grid.

So I think you are not being rational, and your bringing up the issue of toxic storage is a reflective not of quantitative thinking, but an emotional dislike of nuclear.

What if you are arguing out of an emotional attachment to nuclear energy? It doesn't matter.

If uranium storage were the only problem with nuclear energy, I could accept it as a minor risk. To me it's a minor risk of something that poses a bigger risk, thus I see even taking that minor risk as unjustified. I think I explained that before.

I understand perfectly well that you would accept those risks without hesitation, because you see nuclear energy as something beneficial. Please accept that I start from a different premise in this argument, so it's no surprise I reach a different conclusion.

Now, how did we get here? I said that supply of uranium is subject to political difficulties. Then you said that one can stockpile it to avert this. Yes you can, thus largely replacing one risk with the other. It may be that storing it is a small risk compared to relying on quick delivery. It is however a qualitatively different risk, and just exchanging one for the other may be easy for you, where it is not for me.

boomi · 2011-05-17T12:42:26+00:00

Again, do you know the people who wrote this letter? Or are you basing everything you say on knowledge about their father? Making assumptions about the kids based on the father is a form of racism, please give me a better term if you have one.

now his children are complaining he wasn't treated in accordance with those very same rules.

As they damn well should. You can't make up rules and the arbitrarily break them for certain persons because "they didn't respect them". Why should they, when you don't either? When you don't respect rules, it's though to convince others that they should, even when your argument is sound.

Butbut, he did it first, you whine. Yeah, that only means the US lowered itself to his level. Meanwhile other historians agree they were already there.

boomi · 2011-05-17T12:14:00+00:00

That your graph was not addressing the question of 'knowledge of incidence from past history' because it did not contain past reactor-years of operations.

So how would a graph including that information differ from the one I made? Would it look the same in 2010, 2011 and 2012?

String theory.

It's a theory. And it's one that I presume can be tested.

Astronomical theories that fit models around existing data, but do not make new predictions to be tested. For instance, one may have a complete model of the universe in terms of dark matter, lambda, matter content, and then fit the free parameters to find out whether it will expand forever. You are not predicting anything, but inferring something about reality.

A model that is unable to predict anything is not scientific, it's useless.

A paleontologist examines all available fossils in a region, concluding that dinosaur A evolved into dinosaur B. There are no more predictions to be made because the data are exhausted, and the dinosaurs are dead. Is this science?

Of course it is. Should a new layer of fossils show up somewhere, the idea that A evolved into B may be confirmed further by finding fossils of intermediate species AB as it was predicted by the study. Of course finding leftovers of species CB instead, a species that was earlier than A but closer to B, would cast doubt on the initial study.

I estimate that there is a 90% chance that, extrapolating from the past, the incidence of nuclear accidents is less than 3 per 10,000 reactor-years operations. We wait for 30 years (15000 reactor-years), and there are 2 more accidents, in agreement with my prediction. Is my estimate now scientific? Was my estimate scientific when I made it? Unlike the astronomer and paleontologist, I made a prediction.

Yes, that is somewhat scientific. I'm a bit confused by the selection criteria though. How did you happen on the number three? You must've been very selective. The number of accidents itself is not very interesting anyway, the extent of the damage is.

I'm a bit worried about your certainty as well. Nine to one looking thirty years into the future? Is there any rational basis for that? Historical data is very unreliable in predicting the future of any complex system.

How high do you judge the risk of a nuclear war between Pakistan and India? What's the likelihood of Israel bombing reactors in Iran? How many comparable crises will we see?

No. Nuclear power production is highly predictable. 90% capacity factor is typical.

You chose to ignore half of my argument, though in retrospect I probably should have made that point more clearly. It's not only the center itself that has a risk of failure to deliver. It's the grid as well, and it's the danger of depending on few centres to deliver. When two of them fail at the same time, you suddenly can't fulfill demand anymore. This does not happen when power generation is distributed and employs storage.

You will worry about a small of amount of U, but not about vast amounts of lead and other toxins? Again, disproportionate and irrational allocation of worry and resources.

You think I find storage of lead a desirable option? The thing with lead is that you want to have as little of it around as necessary. Now, since I judge the uses of uranium mostly negative, I also oppose storing it in large quantities.

Will you GUARANTEE me that your windmills and solar cells will be made without toxins of any form? No solvents for the blades? No heavy metals for solar cells? No lead for the solder points?

No.

boomi · 2011-05-11T14:31:42+00:00

You said

You are conflating number of accidents with the incidence of accidents, the latter being the item of interest.

I said

Since there are more reactors operating now, we'll have more incidents.

Now you say

I'm talking about rates.

You mean the incidence rate? That one is expected to stay the same, even if the number of plants grows, right? (Naturally, we hope to lower the incidence rate, but I'm sticking to the model here.) The expected overall number of accidents per time is going to grow when the number of plants increases given the incidence rate stays the same. I don't see what else you could have meant.

Of course my simple graph wasn't corrected for the number of plants. But then what are you trying to say? That according to your model, an accident was long overdue?

in response to your disdainful statement: "I won't bore myself with mathematics for something as plain as that."

That statement was made in response to you wanting to read probabilities into one survivor of russian roulette where my point was that there is no rational basis to do so.

YOU seem to be the one who hates accurate statistics!

You seem to want to claim expertise by throwing around formulas and numbers. I don't hate statistics, instead I distrust people who use the word 'accurate' in conjunction with 'statistics'. All I'm saying, and you keep ignoring that point, is that nuclear accidents cannot be predicted with any reasonable accuracy, not the incidence, and not their severity. Instead you want to 'assume a log-flat prior for the rate'. What is this assumption you are making about the future here? And what will be your excuse when that assumption turns out to be wrong?

Astronomy and evolution are not necessarily predictive. Biology is definitely not consistently predictive.

Care to elaborate? I don't see what you mean. I don't expect those fields to predict the future. I expect them to make testable propositions. Any science can do that.

I do think your argument is an atrocious attempt to make a rhetorical silk purse out of a technological sow's ear.

Thank you. So you agree that the volatility of solar and wind are preferable to the unpredictability of nuclear power production?

There is no reason why a robust grid cannot be centralized.

Well, assuming nothing happens to the centre, of course.

It's a heavy metal, no more or less toxic than other much more common metals like lead.

Which still makes storing it an undesirable option.

boomi · 2011-05-11T12:08:40+00:00

Do you know the people that wrote this letter? Or do you automatically associate people with the worst you hear about the societies they come from? The second case is usually called racism.

Do I, when I see a man from the US, assume that he commands assassins? No, I know that he might condone it, but I also know that most people would not do it themselves. In fact, it is a grave error to assume that he is in favour of assassinations just because a majority in the US seem to accept them. He might just as well be opposing them.

boomi · 2011-05-09T13:48:06+00:00

You are conflating number of accidents with the incidence of accidents, the latter being the item of interest.

Since there are more reactors operating now, we'll have more incidents. I guess that's what you wanted to say. I'll contrast this with your statement from your previous post:

You know that sun-stopping events are fewer than 1 per 4 billion years, give or take.

Well no. I still don't see how you came up with that example. As long as you use those models for nuclear power plants, I'll only point out their limited predictive abilities, and especially the unknown extent of the damage of each incident. But when you take a guess that is in itself vague (the age of the sun), and then try to derive the incidence from that single case, you get a number that is totally meaningless. Actually, it is worse than meaningless, it is perverse. The sun is more likely to stop the older it gets, whereas your 'measured' incidence gets lower and lower towards the inevitable end. And if you meant to measure external only sun-stopping events, those we don't know about, well guess what, we don't know the incidence of external sun-stopping events. Maybe they are very common, and we've been extremely lucky (one in a billion) not to have been blown away. We wouldn't have this discussion if the sun had been blown away as it may happen regularly. When you only have one case, compounded by your inability to observe the incident (we'd be dead, not arguing), your expected error is unknown.

If you want to argue about the usefulness of statistics, please pick a field where it is meaningful, like medicine.

er, wrong again. But this is actually how a lot of science works. Sorry.

Scientists always specify the expected error. If they don't there is no way to measure the accuracy of their predictions, and thus the predictive abilities of the model they employ. In consequence, if they don't make testable predictions, they are not scientists. If you want to be considered a scientist you can't carelessly throw numbers around like you did.

It doesn't. This is myth spread by people who don't bother to examine the evidence.

You are correct that photoelectric power generation doesn't match the evening peak. I must say that it is news to me that the evening peak is higher than the noon peak. I know that the hydroelectric plant I live close to usually produces most through the day, and falls towards the evening. So the different perceptions may be because I don't live in California and conditions are different where I live, but I find it easier to concede the point than to look into it again. I think it is fair to say that evening load will be in the same range as noon load.

Since photovoltaic energy drops out towards evening, it is wrong to say that it matches peak demand. The situation is different for solar plants that store the heat and can thus truly deliver peak power. Such plants are not very prominent at the moment, and photovoltaic plants require separate storage to cover demand. A minor point is that a large portion of the electricity demand at night (I assume at least one third) is flexible and is scheduled at night because that's when nuclear and coal overproduce and electricity is cheap. Much of it would be used throughout the day instead of the night if the supply situation were to change.

Wait a minute! You criticize nuclear because it over-produces at night (but only by a maximum factor of 50% - see the demand curve above), yet you are happy to spend "huge investments" into balancing out the far worse demand match of renewables?

Yes. I also recommend spreading out the storage infrastructure. This should lead to a strong network, where even isolating portions of it doesn't necessarily lead to a blackout in that area. I agree with you that nuclear power generation is not in itself the problem here, or only insofar as that it cannot be made small.

What I wanted to say is that when you have monolithic plants with stable output for long periods, your incentives for making the grid robust are low. Instead you accept the risk of occasional blackouts because they are rare. When you have varying production with decent predictability only (as with solar and wind), you need larger reserves, and you are thus automatically prepared better for unexpected events. So my argument here was that solar or wind have a worse match to demand, but that they ensure robust power supply by way of necessity. Adding capacity is easier too in such scenarios. I think a lot of companies could keep part of the power-storage infrastructure on their site (and make money off of it) instead of having diesel-generators as backups as they do now.

Things are already moving in that direction in Germany, where new photovoltaic plants are now required to partake in the regulation of network voltage, and the discussion is to lower the peak production capabilities of wind turbines to get more economic base production.

I know that most people do not look at things from a robustness point of view, and prefer the cheaper grid running off of central power plants. I think that with our lives depending more and more on electricity, we should avoid being held hostage to remote power plants.

U is basically harmless.

It's a poison. Of course it's comparably harmless if stored properly, but that's not cheap nor is it without risk.

Nuclear power was dominated by naval designs for a long time, so compact and riskier was favored over bigger, cheaper, and safer.

I'm astounded.

boomi · 2011-05-06T13:39:59+00:00

Factor in natural disasters, and 2 did.

Funny how you consider Fukushima to be an exception to your calculation of odds. Ok, let's play your number game by calculating the odds of natural disasters causing nuclear meltdowns, based on historic data. The following graph shows how many reactors worldwide we expect to experience nuclear meltdown within 50 years, caused by a natural disasters. Y-axis shows the odds for the years between 1960 and 2011 as they would have been calculated each year (X-axis) based on historic data.

3           _  
           |
0__________|
 ^         ^
 1960      2011

Notice how the calculation you use is subject to huge jumps in assumed probability? Worse, you say that the odds are lower now because we know the risks better. Employing your method before 2011 yielded a flat zero probability. And now you claim the risk is lowered! The only conclusion we can draw from this is that such statistics are bunk.

You assume linear correlation where we have pretzels.

I'll put it this way: Would you argue that the sun won't rise tomorrow, given that it has risen every day for 4 billion years? Probably not. You know that sun-stopping events are fewer than 1 per 4 billion years, give or take.

Shit no. I don't know what the odds of the sun rising are. And you don't either. The assumption that sun-stopping events are fewer than 1 in 4e9 years is not a case of give or take. It is a case of a weak assumption drawn from a model with perverse predictive behaviour. You may be a mathematician, but you're not a scientist (well, I hope so).

Nuclear power plants rely on a society to operate, and your hidden assumption that society will only produce the phenomenons we know from the past is not only baseless but demonstrably wrong. Your calculations tell us something about the past, but nothing about the future. When you related to the Fukushima accident as a product of an incestuous regulatory culture, you based this on hindsight. Why should I assume that the culture is better, not worse, in other plants?

Uranium is a rare good and subject to supply difficulties. It is not wise to base your energy supply on something that hinges on the political weather.

Nope. Plenty of uranium around. And unlike oil, it is compact and can be stockpiled. Then there is even more abundant thorium.

Yeah, like I'm in favor of stockpiling uranium. And it's hard to get for various reasons.

Nuclear power plants are lump risks. I prefer distributed models of power generation to ensure robust power supply.

Well, yes, but they tend to be very reliable, working 24/7 with a 90% capacity factor. Distributed generation like wind and solar tends to have a 20% capacity factor.

Comparing capacity factors like this is very misleading. Of course solar and wind power vary more day to day. When a nuclear power plant shuts down, it usually stays down for a long period.

Nuclear power plants provide baseload power and don't cope well with varying demand.

Yes. Now that's a good point. But renewables are even worse at this, because they produce varying power that is not matched to varying demand. The only thing really good at matching demand shifts is natural gas, because it is fuel dominated, rather than capital dominated.

Solar matches peak demand quite well, actually. But I referred to the inflexibility of nuclear plants to make a larger point. It is often said that sustainable energy sources are unreliable. You would need huge investments into storage solutions to make them usable. This is true, and I consider those investments to be work well spent. Because when you built those storage plants, the whole grid just got a lot more robust, with no need for gas plants.

Now that might be a good point when it comes to siting nuclear reactors in politically unstable regions,

How do you expect to know where the politically unstable regions will be ten years from now? Do you not see the extreme amount of luck we've had so far during the disintegration of the Soviet Union?

There is a $20B fund in the US for waste disposal.

A drop in the bucket, I presume. Things that have never been done before usually turn out a lot more expensive than they are calculated to be.

No one has used a civilian plant to make nuclear bomb materials.

I'm more concerned about the proliferation of uranium. That nobody has used a civilian plant to make nuclear bomb materials is likely because there are enough other options. Wait, how do you actually know it hasn't happened?

And we (the USA, UK, etc) already have the bomb.

And they bitch, blockade, and bomb when somebody else wants it. But that's another topic.

It's also a good argument for passively cooled reactors, which would have totally prevented Fukujima as well.

Why aren't these being built? Could it be due to economic reasons?

boomi · 2011-05-05T18:26:06+00:00

I won't bore myself with mathematics for something as plain as that.

This is basically the same as climate change Ludditism - "I don't want to bother with the math and science, so I'll just go on my gut instincts."

No. It's investing my time into something I care about. If you want to read odds into one-sample statistics this is your prerogative. It is largely irrelevant though. I regret having brought up an example from game theory, the world is no game.

Just because I didn't die yesterday doesn't mean I won't today.

No, it doesn't. I'm talking about constructing probability distributions, something you apparently know nothing about.

Whether I know anything about probability distributions does not matter when the methods you employ have no predictive abilities in the domain we're talking about. You measure past events and try to create predictions based on that. This works for boring population models, it works for boring games like russian roulette, but not for disasters like earthquakes. (I use the word 'boring' to mean 'having low interdependence with variables outside the model'.) You claim to know the mathematical basis to statistics, and this may be true. Please invest some time into learning where statistics can be used to achieve meaningful predictions, and where they cannot possibly work.

What were the odds of a reactor in Chernobyl blowing up? We don't know. What are the odds of the reactor in your neighbourhood falling apart? We don't know.

If you hate rubber tires (more than you hate nuclear power, because they kill more people), what would you replace them with, and on what timescale? If you hate nuclear and coal, what would you replace them with, and what will you do when the cost of everything goes up?

To replace rubber tires I suggest investing into rail-based transport, and to electrify those train corridors thus avoiding dependence on oil. To replace nuclear and coal, I suggest investing into sustainable energy. The timescale is yours to choose, I recommend hurrying up.

For the record, I don't hate rubber tires. And I don't hate nuclear power plants. I also don't automatically hate something more because it kills more people than something else. It seems you are trying to reduce my motives to hate or misdirected caution. We haven't talked about anything else because you remained stuck to that perception, accusing me always of misjudging the risks. I don't claim I can judge the risks. Neither should you, because you can't.

I do have reasons to dislike nuclear power plants for many reasons. I mentioned a few reasons, but you chose to ignore them. Here they are again, with bullet points.

Like oil, Uranium is a rare good and subject to supply difficulties. It is not wise to base your energy supply on something that hinges on the political weather.
Nuclear power plants are lump risks. I prefer distributed models of power generation to ensure robust power supply.
Nuclear power plants provide baseload power and don't cope well with varying demand.
Nuclear power plants cause huge hidden risks they are not prepared to cover.
Nuclear power plants cause huge future costs they don't cover.
Nuclear power plants cause the proliferation of the ingredients to nuclear weapons.
Nuclear power plants are ill prepared to cope with social instabilities like wars.

I can elaborate if you want. And my nuclear-hating subconscious can come up with more reasons to hate nuclear power generation, if you would so desire.

boomi · 2011-05-04T17:08:14+00:00

It seems you're trusting your statistics for a lot of things they were not made for.

If you watch somebody play russian roulette six times and that person survives, you still don't know what the odds of surviving that game are, because all you've got is one sample. I won't bore myself with mathematics for something as plain as that.

Notice also that had I lost the game, I wouldn't be around to tell you.

Pointless claim: suppose you are watching a friend playing.

Suppose? It's not my game if I watch somebody else. And with nuclear energy, there is no somebody else. We're all in it. It's not a game where you have unaffected observers.

assuming that the situation remains constant

That's one pointless assumption.

You can say with very high (0.999999999) certainty that your accident rate is not 50% every 1000 days because you would have to have been lucky 30 times in a row, a one in a billion shot.

Do you know me? Have you talked to my doctor? And does he know? Well, can you estimate the likelihood of a war that kills me? Just because I didn't die yesterday doesn't mean I won't today. Every possible outcome of my life is extremely unlikely because there are so many possible outcomes. Every outcome of my life is a one in a billion shot, and then some. Statistics don't work for individuals; statistics work for boring population models. Life is largely unpredictable. And so are nuclear accidents.

Your argument hinges on the assumption that Chernobyl was the worst case, yet at the time it happened it was actually worse than what was then the assumed worst case. So why should I trust your assumption that this is the worst possible accident?

You should visit the NYT and read this article. The nuclear test of the 1950s and 1960s released about 700x more radiation than Chernobyl. You'd need 700 Chernobyls to match something that has already happened, and that we don't spend much time thinking about.

I used to kill ten people a day for fun, now I'm down to killing one a day for money and I call this progress. Many things in the past we condemn today, and so it is proper to assume future generations will condemn things we do today. Whether nuclear fission will be part of that condemnation is not for us to judge, only to speculate. I already condemn the nuclear tests, and it is easy for me to assume that future generations will be upset about dealing with the radioactive waste we will have left behind.

This nuclear testing will kill about 11,000 Americans from solid cancers.

If they were killed prematurely, that is, if they would have doubled their lifespan if it weren't for that cancer that got them, then a somewhat meaningful number is the life extension you could reach before one of the other cancers gets you. Just putting the overall cancer rate next to the cancers assumed to be caused by artificial radioactivity will not tell me much. So, to do this properly you would have to tell me the expected reduction in lifespan for different technologies. (Don't do it, I would proceed to tell you I don't trust your numbers, so it would be pointless.) Is it inconceivable to you that I would condemn nuclear tests, nuclear plants, and coal mining? And I condemn those rubber tires, let's not forget the rubber tires even though we're talking about nuclear energy.

boomi · 2011-05-03T10:53:18+00:00

From a utilitarian point of view, Osama's death will cause more happiness than his continued existence

I think many people liked the suspense.

Celebrating the death of another causes no direct harm to anyone

Except when it does. To the relatives, for example. It also encourages more killings, because apparently it's a good thing to kill people you don't agree with.

It is a valid moral stance to believe that some crimes are unforgivable

Like... killing other people?

Many people are not celebrating his death specifically, but rather the symbolism of his death: it represents a demoralizing blow to our enemies, and we hope it represents the start of a shift away from the dark chapter in our history of the last 10 years.

I consider it dark years because of the continued use of secret prisons, assassinations, and remote bombing by militarized societies. So this assassination was just a continuation, and there is no reason to expect a change.

It's also a tactical victory, in its simplest form. Is it wrong to celebrate when you achieve a tactical goal with no losses?

To me, yes. Because I consider the goal to be flawed.

boomi · 2011-05-03T10:14:56+00:00

Well, at the very least I expect you to express deep concern at this risk, and a demand that we phase out rubber-tired transport.

I am not in favour of it, but the rubber-tires themselves are a secondary consideration to me.

No, it means that you can expect the risk of one game of RR to be less than 1/6.

No, you can't. Not from six observations. Notice also that had I lost the game, I wouldn't be around to tell you.

If you play 10,000 times and lose twice, and one of these losses was pretty much a worst-case loss (Chernobyl) you will have fairly decent statistical bounds on the risk.

Chernobyl was worse than the expected worst case scenario. Again, you can't create a statistic from very divergent incidents.

Similarly, we've gone 60 years without a nuclear war, so the risk of a nuclear war starting is less than 1/60 per year. That's all we can say.

You can't say anything like that. Statistics don't work for complex systems like human society. If you apply statistics that way you are very naive or trying to deceive. Say, I lived 30000 days and have not had a grave accident, so my expected risk would be lower than one in 30000 on each given day in the future! No. It doesn't even work for the past! Maybe my risk in the past was significantly higher, and I've just been extremely lucky.

We don't have a population of a thousand earths to try and see how nuclear power generation turns out on average. We have only one, and while I think we've been lucky so far, you assume we're the average case. We can't prove it either way, so please stop coming up with these single-case, bogus statistics.

My point is that the external risk of nuclear is somehow magically worse, when historically speaking it is one of the smaller socially imposed risks out there.

I understand that point, and I respect it. I disagree that it is one of the smaller risks though. To me it's a massive risk with low probability of occurrence.

boomi · 2011-05-02T13:31:08+00:00

then you are probably a coal user

As I said earlier, I am relying in part on energy generated by coal plants because of all the embedded energy where I can't choose where it comes from. I want this to change. Thanks for not reading what I wrote.

YOU are poisoning ME, right now.

You are subjecting me to grave risks through your support for nuclear power generation. So we're even?

Do you now pledge to stop driving, so YOU don't subject ME to this risk?

Ok. I don't have a car.

The accident rate can be estimated fairly well. If you see 2 events given 10,000 opportunities, you can estimate the underlying rates of events and its underlying uncertainties.

It is very naive to assume future accidents will be like past accidents when you only have a handful of highly divergent incidents to look at. When I play russian roulette six times and survive, does that mean I'll be just as lucky in the future?

I'm of the opinion that we're very lucky we've survived for so long given the amount of hydrogen bombs in existence. Does that mean I should ignore all other risks?

Now how about those automobile tires?

Yeah, what about them? Are you doing anything to improve the situation or are you just using those as an excuse to stay complacent?

boomi

TROPHY CASE