Is Black the New White?

In the wake of the recent nuclear disaster in Japan, Jeff Sommer of The New York Times wrote an article discussing black swan events and the difficulties they provide in analyzing financial markets. Black swan events, so named because of the rarity of the cygnus atratus of that coloration, can be described as follows*:

1. The disproportionate role of high-impact, hard to predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology

2. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities

3. The psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs

In other words, some things are difficult to model, because though their impact is high, their probability is low. Additionally, when they occur, people tend to view them as 'hundred year storms.' Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb came up with this theory and presciently wrote a book of the same name in 2007 right before the current financial crisis manifested.
 
Now, back to the article. The gist of it was that many viewed the nuclear disaster as such a black swan event, something so unforseeable that the risk of it could not be calculated. And, because of the low probability of individually surprising events, it will be difficult to calculate their costs in the future.
 
However, is that the correct way to think about nuclear disasters, particularly since they have occured in the past? When they do occur, should we be surprised in an increasingly globalized world that, as a result, car plants in the US need to shut down because parts from a devastated Japan are not forthcoming?
 
Going back just a few short years, was it really so unfathomable that the housing bubble, much like every bubble in every commodity in all of history, would be pricked with wide-ranging results? Are terrorist attacks so difficult to imagine with all of the anti-American sentiment in the world? Are oil accidents impossible to predict? Not so, according to many, yet we continue to treat such events as one-offs. Find out more here.
 

*As always, we are well aware of the perils and lack of academic rigor that come with citing Wikipedia. However, as is often the case, at least for our purposes here, taking the easy way out nonetheless provides a completely satisfactory result.