PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

11. FORECASTING DESTINY
in general. The stories regarding both the pros and cons of nuclear energy
simply reflect the attention paid to the subject. The graphs concern
the United States, a country that claims the largest number both of reactors
in operation and years of experience; at the same time it is a country
in which the press is particularly dynamic and influential. The cumulative
accidents data are for nuclear plants built during the first wave of
construction (circa 1974). The sites in the second wave have not been in
operation long enough to produce major accidents. The press coverage
is quantified in terms of an index representing the percentage of periodicals’
space devoted to information relating to nuclear plants. 5 The
cumulative index is plotted in the figure. The curves fitted on the data
provide a fair description for both accidents data and the coverage index,
indicating that we are indeed dealing with phenomena that have a
well-defined beginning and an end, all relating to the first wave of reactor
construction.
The press coverage curve is parallel to, but comes two years before,
the accidents curve. Opinion intensity seems to have preceded accident
probability by a couple of years. This may not prove that it was the
press coverage which caused the accidents (chronological succession
does not necessarily mean causality), but it disproves the opposite: that
it was the wave of accidents which stimulated the press coverage.
It could be that a kind of cultural epidemic renders nuclear reactor
operators more accident-prone. David P. Phillips has provided evidence
in support of what he calls the “Echo Effect,” claiming that following
the publication of news of the suicide or homicide of a popular personality,
car accidents—single cars in particular—increase significantly
with respect to the usual average. They show a large peak three days
after the report and a smaller one eight days later. Similarly, there is a
three-day strong echo effect (and a weaker seven-day one) in airplane
accidents—many of them corporate planes (Appendix C, Figure 11.1).
Most of these accidents are suicides in disguise.
There are some interesting coincidences concerning nuclear plant
accidents. 6 The film The China Syndrome describes events similar to
those that occurred during the Three-Mile-Island accident; it was released
just a few weeks earlier. The accident itself occurred at the peak
of the twelve-year long press-coverage curve (the middle of the S-
curve). This accident, which appeared as the worst ever in the United
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