Deffeyes: Macondo – Fukushima

By Kenneth S. Deffeyes
29 March 2011 One of my former students, Joel Achenbach, has a book being released this week about the BP blowout. (A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea.) His e-mail a week ago asked whether there were parallels between the BP Macondo blowout and the damaged nuclear reactors at Fukushima. My first reaction was “No,” but it was wrong. BP treated their blowout as a string of unlikely events that came together by accident. The BP analogy was a random stack of Swiss cheese slices and the rare occasion when a hole in all of the slices happened to line up. I had been going along with the Swiss cheese analogy, although I was using only two slices of cheese. The first unlikely event was a fracture at the bottom of the well and the second rare event was the failure of the blowout preventer to close. If the break at the bottom of the hole has a probability of one chance in 1000 of happening and the blowout preventer fails only one time in 1000 tries, then the wild well happens only once in a million times. That’s the approach from Statistics 101: multiply the two probabilities together. That’s the Swiss cheese interpretation, but it may not apply to the Macondo blowout. The blowout preventer autopsy from Det Norsk Veritas suggests a different interpretation; an interpretation with a haunting parallel to the Fukushima disaster. …