I Confess!

After posting the preceding blog entry on how there was a certain lack of people denying that any of the Fukushima reactors had melted down, I looked up previous entries on this blog that mentioned “meltdown” and found that I had used the term in a context that made it reasonable to claim that there had been no meltdown:

If I recall correctly, nuclear power plants are supposed to be designed so that we might expect the worst case to occur once every 100,000 reactor years. That means we can expect that an accident that does so much damage that there was a 10% probability of meltdown will occur once every 10,000 reactor years. If there are 400 reactors in operation that will occur about once every twenty five years.

On the other hand, that was a matter of leaving out the phrase “worst possible” before “meltdown.”

On the gripping hand, I had also used it in two entries in the broader sense and even referred to the “recent meltdown.”