New way of designing systems against correlated disruptions uses negative probability

In March of 2011, a powerful earthquake off the coast of Japan triggered the automatic shutdown of reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and simultaneously disrupted electricity lines that supported their cooling. Had the earthquake been the only disaster that hit that day, emergency backup generators would have prevented a meltdown. Instead, a tsunami immediately followed the earthquake, flooding the generators and leading to the most serious nuclear accident in recent history. For systems expert Yanfeng Ouyang, a professor of civil and environmental engineering (CEE) at the University of Illinois, it was a perfect example of the problem of designing systems against correlated disruptions.

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