Calculating nuclear accident probabilities from empirical frequencies

M. Ha-Duong (1) , V. Journé (1)

1 CIRED - centre international de recherche sur l'environnement et le développement

Since there is no authoritative, comprehensive and public historical record of nuclear power plant accidents, we reconstructed a nuclear accident data set from peer-reviewed and other literature. We found that, in a sample of five random years, the worldwide historical frequency of a nuclear major accident, defined as an INES level 7 event, is 14 %. The probability of at least one nuclear accident rated at level ≥4 on the INES scale is 67 %. These numbers are subject to uncertainties because of the fuzziness of the definition of a nuclear accident. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York.

Domaines: Sciences de l'environnement; Economies et finances

M. Ha-Duong, V. Journé. Calculating nuclear accident probabilities from empirical frequencies. Environment Systems and Decisions, 2014, 34 (2), pp.249-258. ⟨10.1007/s10669-014-9499-0⟩. ⟨hal-01018478v1⟩