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Author(s) Wheatley, S.; Sovacool, B.; Sornette, D.

Of disasters and dragon kings: A statistical analysis of nuclear power incidents and accidents

Source
Wiley
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This paper presents a statistical study of risk in nuclear energy systems, providing and analyzing a data set that is twice the size of the previous best data set on nuclear incidents and accidents. the analysis compares three measures of severity:

  • The industry standard International Nuclear Event Scale
  • The Nuclear Accident Magnitude Scale of radiation release
  • Cost in U.S. dollars

One of the key contributions of this publication is the documentation of a significant runaway disaster regime in both radiation release and cost data, associated with the "dragon-king" phenomenon; an event that is both extremely large in size or impact and born of unique origins relative to its peers. According to the authors, even assuming that it is no longer possible to suffer a "dragon-king" event more costly than Chernobyl or Fukushima, the expected annual cost and its standard error bracket the cost of a new plant. This highlights the importance of improvements not only immediately following Fukushima, but also deeper improvements to effectively exclude the possibility of “dragon-king” disasters.

Risk Analysis, March 2016. This article is published under .

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Document links last validated on: 18 December 2019

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Hazards NBC - Nuclear, Biological, Chemical
Themes Critical infrastructure Disaster risk management
Number of pages
17 p.
Publication year
2016

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