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SCIENCE AND ITS LIMITS: THE REGULATOR'S DILEMMA 19 original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution. to litigation, the legal system ought to recognize, much more explicitly than it has heretofore, that science and scientists often have little to say, probably much less than some scientific activists would admit. The bona fides of scientific adversaries often is at the heart of litigation over personal injury alleged to be caused by subtle, low-level exposures. Each side presents witnesses whose scientific credentials are regarded as impeccable by the side the witnesses are supporting. Since the issues themselves tend to be trans-scientific, one can hardly decide the validity of the "scientific" assertions of either side's witnesses. Under the circumstances, one is probably justified in regarding a scientific witness no differently from any other witness: his or her credibility is judged by past record, behavior, and general demeanor, as well as by self-consistency of testimony. Such, at least, was the way in which Judge Patrick Kelley settled the Johnston v. United States case (U.S. District Court, District of Kansas, Wichita, filed Nov. 15, 1984, #81-1060), by impugning, on grounds no different from those one would invoke in an ordinary lawsuit, the competence if not the integrity of one side's scientific witnesses. FINESSING UNCERTAINTY Various approaches for finessing uncertainty can be identified. Two of theseâthe technological fix and invoking the principle of de minimis âare described briefly below without claim that these are the most important, let alone the only, approaches. Technological Fix Science cannot predict exactly the probability of a serious accident in a light-water reactor, or the likelihood that a radioactive waste canister in a depository will dissolve and release radioactivity to the environment. Can one design reactors or waste cans for which the probability of such occurrences is zeroâor at least which depend, for the prevention of such mishaps, on immutable laws of nature that can never fail, rather than on the incompletely reliable intervention of electromechanical devices? Surprisingly, this approach to nuclear safety has come into prominence only in the past five years. K. Hannerz (1983) in Sweden and H. Reutler and G. H. Lohnert (1983) in Germany have proposed reactor systems (an intrinsically safe light-water reactor and the modular high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, respectively), whose safety does not depend on active interventions but on passive, inherent characteristics. Though one cannot say that the probability of mischance has been reduced to zero, there is little doubt that the probabilities are several, perhaps three, orders of magnitude lower than the probabilities of mischance for existing reactors. To the extent that such reactors
