Face it: technology fails. Sometimes. Sooner or later.

Statistics are a nice way to fool people, because they can't interpret the numbers properly. And usually this is done to make things sound less risky than they really are. But it's just too easy to lie with numbers. Say, they risk of a major incident at a plant is less than 1% (per year). Sounds good, doesn't it? But if you have 100 plants, that means it will happen about once a year. Make that 1000. Or even more.

There are currently around 440 nuclear reactors in use for electricity. Probably some more the IAEA doesn't know about. There are definitely extra reactors in various military vehicles including unmaintained russian submarines. So make that 500. So looking forward to the next 200 years, we want to make sure things are not likely to happen at a rate of 0.001%. Unless our atomic plants are way more than 99.999% secure, we're likely to see a major nuclear accident sooner or later.

Which brings us to a totally differnt scale when we look at photovoltaics or wind power. There are just so many more of these plants, that you can bet on some of them failing completely every day. The good news about these plants is that their damage potential is just so much lower. They might be as much as thousandfold more likely to fail than a nuclear plant. And there are probably a thousand more, too. But even if we completely underestimate the risk they just don't do as much damage even in the worst case. Much unlike a nuclear meltdown or such an oil spill. I bet noone would have thought of oil drilling being this risky. After all, it has been done for years.

So how is your risk assessment of nuclear power? Is it less risky than oil drilling?

Unless someone drops in as new maintainer, I'll file for removal of ModLogAn from Debian soon.

The software has been abandoned upstream for, well, a couple of years. It still works okayish (just the patterns need refreshing), and in fact I'm still running it. But there is plenty of software to replace it, and it seems as if many people go the Google Analytics way today.

Please speak up quickly if you care about ModLogAn, otherwise it's gone from Debian soon.