A Critical Look at Risk Assessments for Global Catastrophes

Adrian Kent

Risk Analysis, 2004, vol. 24, issue 1, 157-168

Abstract: Recent articles by Busza et al. (BJSW) and Dar et al. (DDH) argue that astrophysical data can be used to establish small bounds on the risk of a “killer strangelet” catastrophe scenario in the RHIC and ALICE collider experiments. The case for the safety of the experiments set out by BJSW does not rely solely on these bounds, but on theoretical arguments, which BJSW find sufficiently compelling to firmly exclude any possibility of catastrophe. Nonetheless, DDH and other commentators (initially including BJSW) suggested that these empirical bounds alone do give sufficient reassurance. This seems unsupportable when the bounds are expressed in terms of expectation value—a good measure, according to standard risk analysis arguments. For example, DDH's main bound, pcatastrophe

Date: 2004
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:riskan:v:24:y:2004:i:1:p:157-168

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