ABSTRACT
The problem of scale is one to note, since few people have direct personal knowledge and contact with more than, say, 1000 fellow-humans. Thus the expression of risks in terms of ‘one in a million’ is difficult to appreciate; even worse, figures like 106 are not likely to induce, in the ordinary member of the public, any real appreciation of the expected risk. It has been suggested that, rather than use such numbers, risks in the public domain may better be expressed by saying, for example, that the expected loss of life through smoking a fraction of a cigarette on Sundays only throughout the whole of one person’s life is equivalent to the risk of loss of life from cancer arising from the U.K. nuclear power programme-that is precisely the level of risk that it is! Those in the high-technology business do not help themselves at times in this respect, and it has been suggested that nuclear power would be more acceptable to the public if the terminology were less evocative of nuclear weapons. True as this may be, such a change would be a superficial palliative and not likely to persist; no, the problem goes far far deeper, and it is at the root of the problem that attention must be given and improvements made.
