[PLUG-TALK] Risk of earthquake based nuclear problems in USA

Daniel Pittman daniel at rimspace.net
Sat Mar 19 19:28:47 UTC 2011


On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 12:00, Russell Johnson <russ at dimstar.net> wrote:
> On Mar 19, 2011, at 11:08 AM, Michael Rasmussen wrote:
>
>> That's a good something to look at.
>> When I looked at the original "alarmist" story my take away was:
>>    one in 74,000 worse case probability for any area
>>    meaning zero concern for an individual
>>    meaning better plan on how to evacuate a few million people
>>      if you are responsible for NYC because the harm level is so high
>>    the closest nuke plant to PDX is Hanford, prevailing winds don't come this way
>>    I'll worry about my basement flooding.
>>    I'll worry about a local quake bouncing my house off the foundation
>>      or for a high risk
>
> This has been one of the items on my personal list for a while. It seems to me that people (and governments are following suit) are trying to protect themselves from ALL risk, regardless of cost. We can't protect the entire population from all threats. There's always a point of diminishing returns, and there are some things we just shouldn't do because the cost is too much to justify the low return in added protection.

I could not agree more with this.  One of the things that has
entertained me for the last decade is the frequency to which folks
respond to this sort of position with a cry of "but, how can you put a
value on human life?"

Six point nine million, back in 2008.  That was the "value of a
statistical life" used by at least some US government agencies; if the
cost of enforcement was less than that per death, they would go
forward, but if it was higher...

I just wish that something like that was applied in the high
visibility cases too.

Daniel
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