5 ms·

Ok, so I think we agree this was an "obvious" mistake. Given that "obvious" mistakes occur, should one consider using technologies with catastrophic failure mod

Ok, so I think we agree this was an "obvious" mistake. Given that "obvious" mistakes occur, should one consider using technologies with catastrophic failure modes?

jahewson 11y ago
Do you drive a car? If so, you're choosing to use a technology with a catastrophic failure mode triggered by obvious mistakes. So the answer is clearly "yes". Given that we have designs for modern nuclear power plants which are not cooled by water and are impossible to meltdown, we can have our cake and eat it too. Now let's do that.
- acqq 11y ago
  > Given that we have designs for modern nuclear power plants which are not cooled by water and are impossible to meltdown Any plant that works, or is it the same old "in 5 years it will work, this time really"?
- e12e 11y ago
  I'm not sure that's such a clever analogy. First, because traffic deaths is an issue most places with cars, both due to drunk-driving (obvious failure mode), and other more complex/random failures. And while a drunk driver can (and do) kill a family of careful drivers/a pedestrian -- a nuclear plant failure is more akin to the terrible accidents we've seen with derailed trains carrying crude oil, see eg: http://uk.businessinsider.com/crude-oil-train-derailments-2015-3 http://uk.businessinsider.com/crude-oil-train-derailments-20... What we do know, is that all current states able to build nuclear reactors, have suffered from incompetence, corruption and other systematic errors when it comes to large contracts. I've seen no evidence that this has changed. So it would seem that effective disaster mitigation should account for our current reality: We can't store nuclear waste safely, we can't transport it safely, and we can't build nuclear reactors that are safe enough, given the high risk of disasters. I don't think there are any obvious solutions to world energy supply; higher efficiency, less waste are a given (easy to say, hard to implement). Fundamentally, we need to move away from "thinking oil" -- I don't think highly concentrated liquid fuel traded on a (physical/geographic) global market is part of a sustainable future. On the other hand, I don't think we'll replace air freight with Zeppelins - so clearly we'll need some kind of combustion. Maybe hydrocarbons created with electricity, or in combination with biofuels - some manner which is more carbon neutral. And in a way that doesn't destroy our food chain. Local transportation in the form of electric trains and cars, in preference to hydrocarbons. The US is a parody of efficient transportation, but I'm not very hopeful for reform. Even in little Norway, car-sharing hasn't been particularly successful -- poor city planning and habit means that people waste time sitting in long traffic jams, one person to a car. There are quite a few areas ripe to be made more effective with existing technology. But if we can't muster the will to kill the idea of one car per adult, I don't see much hope for other areas.
  - shkkmo 11y ago
    Nuclear power is plenty safe when compared to other sources of power. The 'incompetence, corruption and other systematic errors' apply to all large power projects. Dam failures displace and kill people, coil mines collapse and kill people. Efficiency can help, and long term I'd love to find even safer sources of energy. However, we need to start building more nuclear power plants to reduce pollution and global warming so we can prevent even bigger catastrophes.
    - e12e 11y ago
      > The 'incompetence, corruption and other systematic errors' apply to all large power projects. I'm not convinced "large power projects" are a good idea in general. I think many small power projects are a better idea. Depending on the geography, micro hydro-electric can be a great power source, with little ecological impact, and no disastrous failure mode.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  >Do you drive a car? If so, you're choosing to use a technology with a catastrophic failure mode triggered by obvious mistakes. So the answer is clearly "yes". The difference being that even the most gnarly multi-car pile up doesn't directly involve more than a few dozen individuals. The worst macro-level effect is making everyone 30 minutes late when the interstate backup. "Catastrophic" failures in cars are very localized when compared to the catastrophic failures we've seen in nuclear plants, which cause the permanent emergency evacuation of millions of residents overnight and quarantine zones that must be kept in place for decades. Nuclear power is no joke. Look through the pictures of Fukushima or Pripyat if you don't believe me. Nuclear is way too dangerous to be trusted and doesn't have a place in civilian power generation, no matter how many times people swear "this time we've got it guys, I promise we didn't overlook anything obvious, I promise that we have a super-stable cool new design". These promises can't be trusted when such catastrophic failures are a realistic risk.
  - zurn 11y ago
    Both "worst car accident" contenders here have bigger death tolls than Chernobyl and Fukushima combined: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/9856/which-single-car-accident-in-history-caused-the-most-deaths https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/9856/which-singl... This doesn't really matter though since it's a meaningless safety measure to compare "worst accident per machine" between a single car and a power plant serving a million people. By this measure biking is much safer than train riding. Here's some more useful stats and trivia about death tolls and power generation: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... http://io9.gizmodo.com/5783526/what-is-the-worst-kind-of-power-plant-disaster-hint-its-not-nuclear http://io9.gizmodo.com/5783526/what-is-the-worst-kind-of-pow... By "death toll per single machine", hydro would be the worst energy source, beating nuclear by 3-4 orders of magnitude.
    - andrewprock 11y ago
      I don't think death toll is the catastrophic aspect of nuclear failures. Rather, it is rendering large swaths of productive land unusable. Chernobyl rendered an area about the size of Rhode Island, Samoa, or Luxembourg unusable.

Ok, so I think we agree this was an "obvious" mistake. Given that "obvious" mistakes occur, should one consider using technologies with catastrophic failure modes?

jahewson 11y ago

Do you drive a car? If so, you're choosing to use a technology with a catastrophic failure mode triggered by obvious mistakes. So the answer is clearly "yes". Given that we have designs for modern nuclear power plants which are not cooled by water and are impossible to meltdown, we can have our cake and eat it too. Now let's do that.

acqq 11y ago
> Given that we have designs for modern nuclear power plants which are not cooled by water and are impossible to meltdown Any plant that works, or is it the same old "in 5 years it will work, this time really"?
e12e 11y ago
I'm not sure that's such a clever analogy. First, because traffic deaths is an issue most places with cars, both due to drunk-driving (obvious failure mode), and other more complex/random failures. And while a drunk driver can (and do) kill a family of careful drivers/a pedestrian -- a nuclear plant failure is more akin to the terrible accidents we've seen with derailed trains carrying crude oil, see eg: http://uk.businessinsider.com/crude-oil-train-derailments-2015-3 http://uk.businessinsider.com/crude-oil-train-derailments-20... What we do know, is that all current states able to build nuclear reactors, have suffered from incompetence, corruption and other systematic errors when it comes to large contracts. I've seen no evidence that this has changed. So it would seem that effective disaster mitigation should account for our current reality: We can't store nuclear waste safely, we can't transport it safely, and we can't build nuclear reactors that are safe enough, given the high risk of disasters. I don't think there are any obvious solutions to world energy supply; higher efficiency, less waste are a given (easy to say, hard to implement). Fundamentally, we need to move away from "thinking oil" -- I don't think highly concentrated liquid fuel traded on a (physical/geographic) global market is part of a sustainable future. On the other hand, I don't think we'll replace air freight with Zeppelins - so clearly we'll need some kind of combustion. Maybe hydrocarbons created with electricity, or in combination with biofuels - some manner which is more carbon neutral. And in a way that doesn't destroy our food chain. Local transportation in the form of electric trains and cars, in preference to hydrocarbons. The US is a parody of efficient transportation, but I'm not very hopeful for reform. Even in little Norway, car-sharing hasn't been particularly successful -- poor city planning and habit means that people waste time sitting in long traffic jams, one person to a car. There are quite a few areas ripe to be made more effective with existing technology. But if we can't muster the will to kill the idea of one car per adult, I don't see much hope for other areas.
- shkkmo 11y ago
  Nuclear power is plenty safe when compared to other sources of power. The 'incompetence, corruption and other systematic errors' apply to all large power projects. Dam failures displace and kill people, coil mines collapse and kill people. Efficiency can help, and long term I'd love to find even safer sources of energy. However, we need to start building more nuclear power plants to reduce pollution and global warming so we can prevent even bigger catastrophes.
  - e12e 11y ago
    > The 'incompetence, corruption and other systematic errors' apply to all large power projects. I'm not convinced "large power projects" are a good idea in general. I think many small power projects are a better idea. Depending on the geography, micro hydro-electric can be a great power source, with little ecological impact, and no disastrous failure mode.
cookiecaper 11y ago
>Do you drive a car? If so, you're choosing to use a technology with a catastrophic failure mode triggered by obvious mistakes. So the answer is clearly "yes". The difference being that even the most gnarly multi-car pile up doesn't directly involve more than a few dozen individuals. The worst macro-level effect is making everyone 30 minutes late when the interstate backup. "Catastrophic" failures in cars are very localized when compared to the catastrophic failures we've seen in nuclear plants, which cause the permanent emergency evacuation of millions of residents overnight and quarantine zones that must be kept in place for decades. Nuclear power is no joke. Look through the pictures of Fukushima or Pripyat if you don't believe me. Nuclear is way too dangerous to be trusted and doesn't have a place in civilian power generation, no matter how many times people swear "this time we've got it guys, I promise we didn't overlook anything obvious, I promise that we have a super-stable cool new design". These promises can't be trusted when such catastrophic failures are a realistic risk.
- zurn 11y ago
  Both "worst car accident" contenders here have bigger death tolls than Chernobyl and Fukushima combined: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/9856/which-single-car-accident-in-history-caused-the-most-deaths https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/9856/which-singl... This doesn't really matter though since it's a meaningless safety measure to compare "worst accident per machine" between a single car and a power plant serving a million people. By this measure biking is much safer than train riding. Here's some more useful stats and trivia about death tolls and power generation: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so... http://io9.gizmodo.com/5783526/what-is-the-worst-kind-of-power-plant-disaster-hint-its-not-nuclear http://io9.gizmodo.com/5783526/what-is-the-worst-kind-of-pow... By "death toll per single machine", hydro would be the worst energy source, beating nuclear by 3-4 orders of magnitude.
  - andrewprock 11y ago
    I don't think death toll is the catastrophic aspect of nuclear failures. Rather, it is rendering large swaths of productive land unusable. Chernobyl rendered an area about the size of Rhode Island, Samoa, or Luxembourg unusable.