[SystemSafety] Saying the Wrong Thing

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

Chris,

On 3/28/13 5:32 PM, Chris Hills wrote:
> In your comments you say: "Sir John, a population biologist and not a safety
> engineer, was inadvertently misleading his audience on a matter concerning
> danger."
>
> Yes and no.  Factually he may have been misleading but panic often kills
> more than the original threat..........
> ... it was probably the right thing to say for the overall good of the
> UK population.

I think it would have been fine to say that if you're not within a couple of hundred kilometers of 
the incident location, there is little chance you have any immediate reason to worry.

On the other hand, he didn't even know that at the time. Three cores had been fully melted for four 
days and nobody had any idea of what that would have meant at that time. If he'd said "well, we have 
three full core melts, and a leaking, structurally damaged spent fuel pool containing more than a 
core's worth of fuel rods, four stories up in a structurally significantly weakened building, which 
needs constant water supply at the utmost limits of what we can pump to keep it at a moderate 
temperature, but you probably don't need to be further away than 30km" he would probably have been 
considered crazy.

Someone pointed out to me that this comment may have derived from a conversation he had with British 
Embassy staff in Tokyo. If so, it would have derived from earnest advice given to people who 
understand how to evaluate danger, and thus for whom panic control was unimportant. And the advice 
was wrong.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de