Nuclear accidents with core melting as the ones in Fukushima and Chernobyl play an important role in discussing the risks and chances of nuclear energy. They seem to be more frequent than anticipated. So, we analyse the probability of severe nuclear accidents related to power generation. In order to see learning effects of reactor operators, we analyse the number of all known accidents in time. We discuss problems of data acquisition, statistical independence of accidents at the same site and whether the known accidents form a random sample. We analyse core melt accidents with Poisson statistics and derive future accident probabilities. The main part of the chapter is the investigation of the learning effects using generalised linear models with a frequentist and a Bayesian approach and the comparison of the results.
Part of the book: Statistics