Diesel Generator Demands

To control the risk of severe core damage during a commercial nuclear power station blackout accident, the reliability of the emergency diesel generators to start on demand must be maintained at a high level. The paper “Empirical Bayes estimation of the reliability of nuclear-power emergency diesel generators” (1996) contains data on the failure history of seven nuclear power plants. The variable C1 is the number of successful demands between failures for the diesel generators at one of these plants from 1982 to 1988.

Study questions and activities.

Construct a relative frequency histogram and a boxplot for the data, and describe the shape of distribution.
Calculate the mean and the median of the successful demands between failures.
Calculate the IQR and standard deviation.
Do quartiles reflect their definition accurately? Describe your findings.
Which measure of center appears to best represent the center of the data?