Pandemic, Nuclear Accident… What’s Next?
On the one year anniversary of the pandemic, one science journalist asks why we’re so bad at predicting nasty, rare events.
Thursday 11 March, 2021, marks one year since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, and 10 years since the catastrophic Fukushima nuclear plant accident in Japan.
Not a particularly auspicious day. What will be next?
Both of these tragedies fall into the category of what people sometimes call “black swans”: rare and hard-to-predict events that catch us by surprise, and have huge negative consequences, yet in hindsight seem obvious or predictable. (Hindsight is 2020, you could say.)
As a science journalist, I have written about plenty of such tragedies in the past and future: from a bizarre lake explosion in Africa to supervolcanic eruptions, asteroid strikes and fungal plagues. You could argue I was well placed to see nuclear accidents and pandemics coming. Yet, like everyone else, I was caught off guard.
The way that humanity approaches such low-probability high-impact events is remarkable. We are astonishingly bad at it. Research shows that we typically overestimate the probability of such events (like whether their airplane will crash), and yet underestimate or even dismiss their impacts (what it would be like to live through a flood, megaquake or stock market crash). This allows most people (and policy makers) to brush aside most such imponderables as something-to-worry-about-later. In hindsight, we slap our heads and blame politicians for not protecting us from the obvious. Yet even when they make an indelible impact in our history books, minds and hearts, the lessons from these events are somehow quickly forgotten.
Nuclear Meltdown
The Fukushima accident in 2011 was triggered by a massive earthquake which kicked off a tsunami (both completely anticipate-able); the power for the nuclear plant went off with the quake, and the backup generators were flooded by the wave — meltdown and disaster ensued (I edited a “Nuclear Landscape 10 Years After Fukushima” piece for Nature, which covers the history and impact of this event on the nuclear industry, if you’re curious).
Remarkably, the issue of critical backup generators being flooded had been highlighted 6 years earlier during Hurricane Katrina, when floodwaters took out hospital generators placed too low. Effectively, the same thing happened in Japan. In hindsight, this seems an unforgivable oversight. Yet plenty of nuclear plants in the US have been reported as having similar vulnerabilities to flooding. That lesson has not been fully learned.
Disease Strike
Pandemics are inevitable: they have happened throughout human history, and we had plenty of fore-warnings in the form of low-impact pandemics (most people aren’t even aware that the 2009 swine flu was officially labelled a pandemic, too — that one was scary in that it affected the young as much as the elderly, but the fatality rate was tiny at 0.01%). These “practice pandemics” should have prepared us, along with dire warnings from every corner and even Hollywood films about the next highly-contagious, highly-fatal disease.
Yet, somehow, it still caught us off guard. I edited a massive report called “Our Future On Earth, 2020” (written throughout 2019) — to my shame, it doesn’t even mention the word “pandemic” once.
If and when we emerge from the grip of COVID-19, will humanity be any better prepared for the next, inevitable pandemic, or will we be worn down and all-too-willing to bury the experience as finally over? I suspect the latter.
Next Up
What will the next such incident be? I live near Vancouver, in a part of the world that is certain to experience a large earthquake, one day, and yet my family has done very little to prepare. We have some extra food in the house, and are lucky to live in a small town where the kids’ school, amenities, and a natural water source are within walking distance. But the possibility still doesn’t feel particularly real. Perhaps the possible impacts of such an event are simply too painful to consider.
Here’s hoping we can all change.
Humanity is, of course, currently sliding towards a world with far more high-impact previously-low-probability events, from droughts to storms, wildfires and even ocean heatwaves, thanks to climate change. This is a different sort of beast: it is coming up on us slowly, and we’re making it happen ourselves. Still, again, most people seem able to go about their daily lives while dismissing the probable impacts of such future events. Perhaps we won’t wake up until we’re waist-deep in water, wondering why we didn’t stop the lights from going out.
