Talk:Probabilistic risk assessment/Archives/2012

Merging with Risk assessment page

This is messy, there is no reason not to merge this page as a (useful) chapter of the main RA page. Probabilistic risk assessment is risk assessment for which the parametric uncertainties have been taken into account.194.254.175.14 (talk) 22:20, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Quantitative risk assessment is redirected to this page, presumably because there is currently no QRA page written. Reviewing the Wikipedia risk analysis pages there seems to be no general structure at all. It needs a complete reorganisation, starting with the basics and then splitting out into the various fields of use. David Vose — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.23.229.120 (talk) 09:31, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Criticism

The entire criticism discussion is based on a single article that is clearly biased against nuclear power. The analysis of the Fukishima event as an example of complex system interactions makes no sense. This event proceeded pretty much as any nuclear engineer would predict, given a tsunami significantly larger than the plant was designed for. Some hidden complexity of system interactions were not responsible for the event. There would have been no event, had the plant been designed for the tsunami height that occurred. Suppose a large meteor crashed into a nuclear plant and completely demolished 80% of the reactor containment building and its contents. After the fact, you could study all the interesting things that the plant equipment did or failed to do, but it has no relevance to the adequacy of the design. The plant is not designed for a massive meteor hit, although it could certainly happen. To conclude that catastrophic events are inevitable at nuclear plants is extremely misleading, at best. To make such a statement, you first need to define what a catastrophic event is. The Japan tsunami was a catastrophic event, killing thousands of people and destroying billions of dollars worth of property, including 3 nuclear reactors that were not designed for the catastrophic event. The loss of the 3 reactors is a catastrophic event for TEPCO. The resulting "nuclear disaster" in insignificant compared with the direct tsunami damage. No person has died, or even received dangerous levels of exposure to radiation. Offsite contamination levels are well above normal and also above pre-established levels intended as acceptance criteria for design and analysis. These limits for public exposure used in design are not in any way representative of levels approaching dangers to health. The world nuclear organizations are urging the Japanese government to use more realisting limits in the cleanup effort, to avoid scaring the public with inappropriate concern about very low levels, and to also allow people to return to their land and to avoid wasting billions of dollars in unneeded cleanup. See NEI.org for the reports.63.77.247.10 (talk) 23:01, 19 January 2012 (UTC)