NUCLEAR POWER IS TOO RISKY AND IS BASED ON THE UNRELIABLE METH OF TRIAL-AND-ERROR. No Moral Nukes. Robert E. Goodin. Ethics, Vol. 90, No. 3 (Apr, 1980), pp. 417-449. Published by The University of Chicago Press. Stable URL http://www.jstor.org/stable/2380581 First, we must have good reasons for believing that the errors, if they occur, will be small. Otherwise the lessons maybe far too costly. Some nuclear mishaps will no doubt be modest. But for the same reasons small accidents are possible so too are large ones, and some of the errors resulting in failure of nuclear reactor safeguards maybe very costly indeed. This makes trial and error inappropriate in that setting (Weinberg app Hafle 1974).2 Second, errors must be immediately recognizable and correctable (Goodin and Waldner 1979). The impact of radioactive emissions from operating plants or of leaks of radioactive waste products from storage sites upon human populations or the natural environment may well be a "sleeper" effect that does not appear in time for us to revise our original policy accordingly. Finally, learning by doing is a flawed strategy because it is often unclear how to describe the salient features of what you have done in the past and hence what "lessons" to draw from the experience. Models building on "fuzzy set theory" show how complicated the decision problem becomes if the classification of events is in doubt as well as the probabilities of their occurrence.
