Astral Codex Ten

Rasmussen

4 min read

Rasmussen

Article

Rasmussen is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 06, 2023 and July 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Rasmussen mentions a young man who was told by his foster father”; “Rasmussen delivered. In January of 1974, after 60 person-years of effort, the Chair of the AEC reported”; “Rasmussen’s team predicted the Rube Goldberg cascade”. It most often appears alongside 1960 Valdivia earthquake, AEC, Alaska.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: April 06, 2023
  • Last seen: July 01, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: The Arctic Hysterias
April 06, 2023 · Original source
People in the prime of their lives whose relationships with members of their group had been threatened were candidates for suicide. There were several ways one’s relationships might be come threatened. One occurred when a person became socially or physically disabled and a hardship on the community. He would soon realize the growing dissatisfaction among his associates. The group would initially resort to teasing, joking, and ridiculing him. If these mechanisms failed to produce the desired changes, the group ceased all communication with him; even his friends and kin might not speak to him or look at him. Frequently relatives admonished the individual to the point of encouraging him to do away with himself. Rasmussen mentions a young man who was told by his foster father, “I wish you were dead! You are not worth the food you eat.” And they young man took the words so seriously that he declared he indeed would not eat again. To make the suffering as brief as possible, the same young man lay down stark naked in the bare snow and was frozen to death.
Your Book Review: Safe Enough?
July 01, 2023 · Original source
The leader of this effort to reinvent nuclear risk assessment was MIT engineering professor Norman Rasmussen, who was tasked with developing quantitative risk measures in terms easily understood by the public. Rasmussen recommended a radically sophisticated approach to risk assessment, leveraging a new technique called Probabilistic Risk Assessment.
The solution proposed by Rasmussen was to calculate the probabilities for chains of safety-component failures and other factors necessary to produce a disaster. The task was mind-boggling. A nuclear power plant's approximately twenty thousand safety components have a Rube Goldberg quality. Like dominoes, numerous pumps, valves, and switches must operate in the required sequence to simply pump cooling water or shut down the plant. There were innumerable unlikely combinations of failures that could cause an accident… the potential for error was vast, as was the uncertainty that the final estimate could capture all important paths to failure.
Rasmussen delivered. In January of 1974, after 60 person-years of effort, the Chair of the AEC reported to Congress that the odds of a significant meltdown were less than one in a million. Congress and the public could rest assured that nuclear energy was far safer than comparable electrical generation methods such as coal, or a hydroelectric dam. The risks were astonishingly small, akin to getting hit by a meteor falling from the sky. Commissioner Ramey had nothing to worry about. The academics showed that nuclear energy was plenty safe enough.