Black Swan events

But how far do you go in preventing an accident When do you stop You can t protect against everything, can you What is a reasonable design limit Do you need to worry about worst-case scenarios or just an average accident scenario What about black swan events These are critical questions that you have to answer before you start anything. 

A black swan event simply put is a surprise and totally unexpected very rare event that is highly improbable but with catastrophic consequences (very, very low probability of occurrence with very, very high impact). These are very rare... 

The Institute of Nuclear Power Operations wrote an interesting addendum to their INPO 11-005, Special Report on the Nuclear Accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. They go on to discuss some of the lessons learned from the black swan event. Many of the lessons learned are heavily related to nuclear-specific design and operational issues however, here are some that have more universal application and again are themes that we shall see throughout this book (INPO, 2012) ... 

Black swan events have been defined (Taleb 2007) as having three characteristics ... 

Black swan events can be experienced in a large variety of diverse activities such as finance, scientific discoveries, technological changes and politics. This paper is limited to considering major industrial accidents. 

In January 2011, Tony Hayward, who was CEO of BP at the time of the DWH event, said that it was a Black Swan event. If he meant that the event was out of the blue or just bad luck, then he was using the phrase as an excuse. However, the three criteria that Nicholas Taleb listed—the author of the book Black Swan—do, in fact, fit the DWH event. This topic is further discussed in Chapter 8. 

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