On 27 November 2011 23:12, Dinesh Shah (દિનેશ શાહ/दिनेश शाह) <[email protected]> wrote: > > BTW, far more number of people die in road and rail accidents in India > and around the world than nuclear reactors going bust. > > Should we ban all road and rail travel? after all auto-mobiles and > rail are also considered technology.
This particular meme seems to be absolutely standard around the world, to be used in all scenarios where one wants to enforce one's point of view. And of course, it is plain wrong. Road accidents can be certainly reduced by banning road travel, and that is obviously not a decision you want to make. So you will start by identifying particular stretches of roads that seem to be more dangerous than others and (a) ban traffic on those stretches, or (b) improve those stretches to eliminate the accident-causing factors. Since banning is still not an option, you will turn to the latter. If you do that in a structured way, you will also further emerge with metrics like "accidents per 1000 vehicles" or "accidents per 1000 route-km" and so on, that will allow you to meaningfully compare two separate stretches of roads. And then you will attempt to do a similar analysis with a planned nuclear reactor. You will end up realizing that in terms of the metric that can be meaningfully compared - like "deaths per 1000 population" or "deaths per year of operation" - your average nuclear reactor is several orders of magnitude more dangerous that your average state highway. Now you will start factoring in the probability of a failure. At which point, after investigating the geological and other factors, you will hopefully realize the killer legacy our current incumbent in the PMO is hell bent on leaving for our children. Binand -- http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
