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In 1979, there was a partial meltdown at a nuclear plant on Three Mile Island, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. I was a young newspaper editor at the time, and I was caught up in coverage of the resulting debate about whether nuclear power could ever be safe. I have long forgotten the details of that episode, except for one troubling thought that occurred to me in the middle of it: The experts we relied on to tell us whether a given design was safe, or indeed whether nuclear power generally was safe, were people with advanced degrees in nuclear engineering and experience running nuclear plants. That is, we were relying on people who made their living from nuclear power to tell us if nuclear power was safe. If they started saying out loud that anything about the nuclear enterprise was iffy, they risked putting themselves out of business.
I mention this not because I think the engineers lied to the public. I don't. Nor do I think nuclear power is so dangerous it should be rejected as an energy source. I mention it because it shows how hard it can be to make sense of information from experts.
Trust in institutions and expertise has taken a lot of knocks in the last decade. Can society recover it? Are we all called to a higher effort to vet the information we are given, or is there another, better remedy?
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday August 29 2017, @07:02PM
I'll be back to mod you up when I my points recycle. This is undoubtedly an enormous problem -- to make nuclear safe requires so much money as to make it economically unfeasible so the solution is shortcuts and hoping for good luck. When the thing goes kaput (or we just need to store the waste safely), the public picks up the expense and the cancer. This is why I think of NP as the gold standard of economic moral hazard. The people get all the expenses, monetary and otherwise, and the MBAs get first class vacations far far away.