But I think even at a toy level we could make the estimate more accurate by having a term for “P(dam failure within X years, absent our intervention)”.
I agree that’s important, and would like to add a section for that. I did not find any actual quantitative estimates of the risk, and now think that one initial step here would be for someone to comb the research more thoroughly than I did, or survey some engineers either involved or not, or outright commission someone to model the risk of the dam.
I don’t know if other actors will fix it, though they haven’t so far in 35 years, including when the U.S. occupied Iraq.
My qualitative sense of the risk is, “This will eventually collapse at some point if nothing permanent is done beyond indefinite grouting work, which has some amount of imperfection, and no one is doing the permanent fix.”
I think this means that since the damage is cumulative, there could be some predictability to it. Probability would only increase over time. Maybe if a detailed enough simulation were done, we could get a better sense of it.
That means I would maybe put 20% on it collapsing by 2040, and maybe 60% by 2060 (without additional intervention).
I don’t know what the likelihood of outside intervention is, but I wouldn’t put it at greater than half over the next 20 years. So that puts my personal ballpark at 10% chance of collapse in the next 20 years.
We also have to include the risk of Great Power War or something else more disruptive than ISIS occupation halting the grouting work.
I would be rather worried about rough outside view calculations preventing someone from engaging with this who would have. Far better to form a physical model of what’s happening with the dam, if someone can do that (I was disappointed to see none of that IIRC with my Three Gorges Dam question). We could also model who are the likely individuals to fund a fix, talk to them to see if they have plans for that, and try to influence them, at pretty low cost.
I agree that’s important, and would like to add a section for that. I did not find any actual quantitative estimates of the risk, and now think that one initial step here would be for someone to comb the research more thoroughly than I did, or survey some engineers either involved or not, or outright commission someone to model the risk of the dam.
I don’t know if other actors will fix it, though they haven’t so far in 35 years, including when the U.S. occupied Iraq.
My qualitative sense of the risk is, “This will eventually collapse at some point if nothing permanent is done beyond indefinite grouting work, which has some amount of imperfection, and no one is doing the permanent fix.”
I think this means that since the damage is cumulative, there could be some predictability to it. Probability would only increase over time. Maybe if a detailed enough simulation were done, we could get a better sense of it.
That means I would maybe put 20% on it collapsing by 2040, and maybe 60% by 2060 (without additional intervention).
I don’t know what the likelihood of outside intervention is, but I wouldn’t put it at greater than half over the next 20 years. So that puts my personal ballpark at 10% chance of collapse in the next 20 years.
We also have to include the risk of Great Power War or something else more disruptive than ISIS occupation halting the grouting work.
I would be rather worried about rough outside view calculations preventing someone from engaging with this who would have. Far better to form a physical model of what’s happening with the dam, if someone can do that (I was disappointed to see none of that IIRC with my Three Gorges Dam question). We could also model who are the likely individuals to fund a fix, talk to them to see if they have plans for that, and try to influence them, at pretty low cost.
Could you please provide a source for the “500,000 to 1.5 million” deaths estimate?