Solution and all other in situ mining drastically improves the safety of mining, which brings us to a much discussed and misunderstood topic: risk.
The most inept approach to risk (and essentially the one chosen by the Kemeny Commission) is simply a consideration of what could happen. You, gentle reader, could be hit by a meteor as you read these lines, assuming that you didn't already break your neck as you got out of bed this morning, or electrocute, poison, stab, strangle, and maim yourself during breakfast. To escape from this predicament, you might consider suicide, but even that is risky, as shown by a report by the London Daily Express in 1894 (this writer read it in 1944 in the "50 Years Ago" column): A British suicide took poison and tried to hang himself from a cliff above the sea, shooting himself in the head as, noose around his neck, he jumped out of this world. But he missed and shot through the rope, falling into the sea below; the brine he swallowed neutralized the poison, and the sea washed him ashore. (As a side observation, the Daily Express of 1894 seems to have had much the same credibility as the New York Times of 1979.)
The next best, but still rather poor, approach is to compare risks to benefits. The trouble here is that sooner or later one has to balance human lives against dollars; and various artifices to evade this difficulty (such as marginal risk/benefit) are artificial and rather unconvincing transplants from microeconomics into foreign soil.
Probably the soundest risk analysis is a simple comparison of risks for various alternatives resulting in the same benefit; e.g., a comparison of the risk of death, injury and disease for the same amount of electric energy by various methods of generating it.(*)
But yet another approach has now been proposed by two European and one South African scientists: Ask not how safe is safe enough, but ask how safe is too safe. For example, there is no limit in making driving safer¾in theory, one could arrange for rubber landing grounds to receive heavily armored cars carrying spring-suspended drivers after they have crashed through the railing along a curve in the road. However, there comes a point when one driver's life is saved by sacrificing another life in the production of these safety features, for their production is not riskless, either. (For example, in Germany in 1973, the risk of an occupational fatality was 0.08 per mille in the production of textile clothing, and 1.6 per mille in inland shipping.) Going beyond this point, therefore, is "too" safe.
The authors have worked out figures for several cases, though they warn that these reflect only the order of magnitude and may not be applicable in particular situations. In applying their criterion to the siting of nuclear plants away from population centers, they arrive at a distance of only 30 km (19 miles), because beyond this distance more health effects are expected during the construction of the electrical transmission line than are to be avoided by remote reactor siting.
Sounds eminently reasonable (and flatly contradicts one of the Kemeny Report recommendations). But when it comes to nuclear power, who is reasonable any more?
[More: How safe is "too" safe? by S.Black, F.Niehaus and O. Simpson, Working Paper WP-79-68, June 1979, International Inst. f. Appl. Systems Analysis, Publications Dept., A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria; price unknown, try $3.50 (personal checks accepted).]
*This is the method used in The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, which has just sold its 33,000th copy. The 9th printing, just out, has a "Post -Three-Mile-Island Preface." $5.95 from Golem Press, Box 1342, Boulder, CO 80306.
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Vol. 7, No. 4
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Volume 7 Issue/No.: Vol. 7, No. 4 Date: December 01, 1979 02:56 PM Title: The scribblers
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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