Goku dit :

Retranscription de la conférence de David Suzuki et de Schnidler:

SCHINDLER: I would say the biggest thing people should have learned from the Japanese nuclear accident is that for rare events that are catastrophic the tendency of politicians to go to risk based management is folly. Risk based management works well if you’re calculating car crashes and the probability of getting in one. Things where you have a big database and lots of events in a big variety of things. For things that happen very very rarely so that you can’t really calculate the probability – just to give you a number astronomically low and that would be for a tsunami or a nuclear power plant failure. Well, how is it then, that when you think the probability on a risk-base is of a tsunami causing 6 nuclear plants to fail…and then if that doesn’t blow your mind enough, the calculation of a risk of a deepwater oilspill is astronomically low. And that happened just a few months later. So the message is: There are things that are important enough that you don’t tolerate any risk. You have to have data to work with to generate reliable risk estimates and it just doesn’t work for rare or catastrophic events. And that’s something that we as a society need to know because we have politicians who want to see these risk calculations on everything and if they’re below a certain threshold, you know, go with the in doubt one. The precautionary principle has been lost.

SUZUKI: We’re always being told these technologies are foolproof but what is a foolproof technology? It’s a technology free of fools. And who hasn’t been at some point gone to a party and gotten hammered and you come in hungover the next day, or got a cold and didn’t want to lose a days wages so you come in, or fallen in love and lost 50 IQ points. I mean, lots of things makes us fools and you can’t anticipate the fool. How a real life fool -and technology. But, you know, I make a point of not accepting invitations to be on organizations – foreign organizations – because I’m focused just in Canada, but last year I did accept one international invitation to be part of: Japan’s Renewable Energy Foundation. It was set up after Fukushima. Fukushima is the most terrifying situation I can imagine. You asked, « What can we do? » First of all you have got to get a government that isn’t in total collusion with techno…the energy companies. They’re lying through their teeth. 3 out of the 4 plants were destroyed in the earthquake and in the tsunami. The 4th one has been so badly damaged that the fear is: if there’s another earthquake of a 7 or above that thing then will go and then all hell breaks loose. And the probability of a 7 or above earthquake in the next 3 years is over 95%. Now what they’ve got in there is 1300 rods of spent fuel that have to be kept in water all the time. And they have no way of getting it out and, you know, they’re pouring water in and that water’s leaking out and now they’ve got this cockamamie scheme of trying to freeze the soil so the (unintelligible) flows in – well – they don’t know what to do and the thing we need is to get an international group of experts to go in with complete freedom to do what they suggest and right now the Japanese government has too much pride to admit that. I have seen a paper which says that, if, in fact, the 4th plant goes under an earthquake and those rods are exposed it’s bye bye Japan and everybody on the West Coast of North America should evacuate. If that isn’t terrifying I don’t know what is.

Si un courageux veut se la ncer dans une traduction… Moi, je passe mon tour