Letter: When statistics fail to reassure

Sir: I note in today's Independent that the chances of a serious accident at a nuclear installation is rated at one in a million, according to the Health and Safety Executive. I confess to finding it somewhat unnerving that the careful calculations and considerations of this body have produced, from its banks of computers, a nice round and reassuring figure.

Surely, the mathematical chance of the odds ending up at exactly one million to one are . . . one million to one.

Tony Allen, the alternative comic, once tried to find out what odds Ladbroke's were prepared to offer on the likelihood of a serious nuclear incident occurring over the next 10 years. It was against their policy to quote on bets that could involve injury or loss of life, but it would have been revealing to obtain a private sector rating of the odds and to compare it to the reassuringly high numbers that universally emerge from the official statistic generators.

Yours sincerely,

GREGORY SAMS

London, NW10

6 October