9 ms·

Fukushima has demonstrated that humans aren't great at controlling or predicting the real risk of nuclear. The fact is, even if no one dies from acute radiation

by pdog 10y ago

Fukushima has demonstrated that humans aren't great at controlling or predicting the real risk of nuclear. The fact is, even if no one dies from acute radiation poisoning, nuclear disasters are costly and devastating.

loeg 10y ago
That can be mitigated in the US because the entire country doesn't run along a fault line. Not so Japan. Yes, don't build your nuclear reactor in western California.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  The Fukushima reactor stood the earthquake without damage, and could have been easily designed to withstand the tsunami. It was not. How, you might say? Put the backup generators in waterproof bunkers, or simply on platforms high enough to keep them dry. It's not expensive or tricky, it's just that the failure mode did not occur to anyone in charge.
bpodgursky 10y ago
Fukushima has demonstrated that relying on 60's technology and refusing to upgrade or invest because of political sensitivities exposes you to disasters 50 years down the line. It's like if everyone got afraid of airplanes in the 1980's and kept flying the same ones from the 60s through today because people were afraid to build new ones. Would you say air travel was unsafe, or that we made poor technology investments?
- lispm 10y ago
  Now you understand a tiny part of the Energy business. 'Nuclear' is not only a technical problem, it is a financial problem. Old plants will be run until they collapse - unless a regulator keeps the companies from doing that. But then the regulator comes onto pressure, because there is huge amount of money/corruption involved to keep the plant online. Every single plant is a multi-billion dollar investment, jobs, surrounding industry, ... Tepco from Fukushima claimed until the day their plants were hit, that everything was totally safe. Politics supported them. Nobody was questioning them.
  - mpweiher 10y ago
    Yes, and despite the technical failings, the political failings and the corruption, the effects were comparatively benign.
    - sfifs 10y ago
      Possibly to you sitting on the other side of the world. Not so for the thousands of people displaced who lost their homes and communities through no fault of their own and might be exposed to higher cancer rates in their lifetimes.
      - mpweiher 10y ago
        Yes, the evacuation zone almost certainly should have been smaller, that's one of the perverse effects of the panic about nuclear, that the mitigation efforts tend to be overblown (not that they should be zero), and therefore the damage from the mitigation much worse than it needs to be. But you missed the word "comparatively". We have lots of human-/technology-induced deaths and injuries. We allow car traffic in our cities at speeds that kills and maims thousands, often children. These are completely avoidable, just lower speed limits to 5mph or less. The US allows more than ten thousand gun deaths every year, because "reasons". etc. etc. So yes, the effects were comparatively benign, compared to most of the technology we surround ourselves with, and certainly compared to all power-generating technologies we have (including solar). Not absolutely benign, though it would be interesting to compare the damage even of accidents like Fukushima to the benefits (in lives saved) of the electricity that was produced.
        petre 10y ago
        There are people who have returned to their old residences inside the Chernobyl danger zone and they're doing just fine.
    - lispm 10y ago
      Right, it will cost only a few hundred billion dollars, maybe a trillion, to clean up the effects from the earthquake on the nuclear power plants. The country lost most of their nuclear power plants in a single day. It takes years, if not decades to bring them back online - partly. 50 plants. Each worth, say, ten billion dollar (current worth and future earnings - just an estimate). That loss alone goes into the hundreds of billions. Additionally fuel had to be imported, other plants had to be built. 'Currently 42 reactors are operable and potentially able to restart, and 24 of these are in the process of restart approvals. The first two restarted in August and October 2015.' Six years after the earthquake/tsunami. Only a few ten thousand people, maybe a hundred thousand, will work in Fukushima under extreme circumstances to keep the site stable and clean it up the site for the next five decades. Robots die regularly after a short time inside the reactors. Humans get a year worth radioactive exposure in a few hours. Where to get all the people needed to work there? We have experience to dismantle functioning reactors. Here we have damaged reactors with damaged fuel... Very little effects... I don't think so. The effects were much more severe than the industry thought. They were thinking that most of the reactors would operate again, by now. World-wide reactor projects were seeing delays. Companies have a hard time to survive. All these are effects of a single earthquake/tsunami on the nuclear reactor industry. It's a huge financial catastrophe for the nuclear industry and the countries financing it.
- jacobush 10y ago
  Actually, none of what you said refutes the parent post, rather proves the point. Humans as a group have demonstrated a lack of maturity handling nuclear power.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    A lack of maturity by what standard? When we say such things of an individual, we do so by comparison with other individuals. With whom do you compare our entire species?
    - jacobush 10y ago
      I can at best give you a circular (or spiral, given that generations pass) argument: nuclear has not demonstrated that it has a great appeal to current stock of humans.
      - AstralStorm 10y ago
        It didn't because humans are not rational and bad press is highly overblown. Mostly because of link to weapons of mass destruction I suppose. Nobody says anything about the health and ecological disaster that is coal and oil. People do not attribute mining deaths to it and are bad at linking long term chronic health effects to them. A red herring of solar and wind is proposed that people haven't rejected due to outages thanks to the other technologies covering its major drawbacks. Likewise hydro disasters are not covered as much as they should.
  - ageofwant 10y ago
    And demonstrated maturity by burning coal that as part of normal predictable operations kills thousands a year? Humans' continous insistence on burning coal instead of thorium may well be our Fermi filter.
    - jacobush 10y ago
      Of course not. Demonstrated even MORE immaturity by burning coal. Aliens discussing us: "are the earthlings burning coal for fuel? I thought you said they couldn't even handle nuclear fission?" "Yes dear Sklaar, it's even worse than we thought. Can you believe where they put the exhaust? Straight into the atmosphere!" And so it happened that Earth was put into another 1000 years of no-contact-policy at the latest board of review, kids...
- mpweiher 10y ago
  And even with all of these obvious and avoidable mistakes, there were no fatalities. In fact, it was Fukushima that turned me around on nuclear. I always thought that the risks were just too great, that if you weren't perfect there would be disasters of unimaginable proportions. And humans just aren't perfect. I was wrong. Well, not on the last bit :-)
mpweiher 10y ago
Dunno. The Tsunami killed upwards of 15000 people. I don't have figures, but I am sure that a good number of these were not killed by the wave directly, but by technical contraptions that failed, crushed them or what have you. One of these many technical contraptions that was damaged/destroyed by the Tsunami was the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Yet, so far not a single person has been killed as a result of that failure, and so far the predictions are that future deaths will be so low as to disappear into the statistical noise. (And these predictions tend to be on the high side: the WHO created reports every decade after Chernobyl, and each report massively revised those estimates downwards). Yet, all we ever hear about is Fukushima. Odd. That.
- agroot12 10y ago
  There would be more deaths if Japan and Tepco would not pour billions of dollars into collecting as much waste as possible. The waste of Fukushima is still an unsolved problem that will eat many billions more (see https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/world/asia/struggling-with-japans-nuclear-waste-six-years-after-disaster.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/world/asia/struggling-...). In fact, even when your reactor does NOT explode, you still have to manage the waste for 10,000 to 1,000,000 years (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Long_term_management_of_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Long_term_manage...). The radioactive materials are not only deadly due to their radiation; most of them are also highly toxic. So even without a meltdown, you risk many lives in the future. Just because not many people have died yet does not make it a safe energy choice. Who in their right mind can guarantee safe storage of the waste for 10,000+ years?
  - 0xfeba 10y ago
    > So even without a meltdown, you risk many lives in the future. Just because not many people have died yet does not make it a safe energy choice. Even if that's true, compared to the certain deaths per year caused by coal it still wins out.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    You don't need to be able to guarantee safe storage for 10,000+ years. For starters most of it can be reprocessed and reused, resulting in less dangerous waste. But no matter how reckless you decide to be with it, the amounts are small enough that it'll be nothing compared to the devastation caused by coal.
ekianjo 10y ago
We are still waiting for Fukushima nuclear event related deaths. The tsunami already killed 15000 people. Yeah, nuclear is super risky.
Turing_Machine 10y ago
1) Massive earthquake 2) Devastating tsunami 3) Crippling fire causing loss of power to all control circuitry. Even with all that, the number of direct radiation casualties was zero. There are about six workers who got more than a lifetime allowed dose of radiation. They may have an increased cancer risk. 1) How many do you suppose would have died had it been a hydroelectric dam of similar capacity? (hint: a lot more than six) 2) Just how safe does something have to be?
mizchief2 10y ago
We can stop building nuke plants on fault lines right on the coast without abandoning nuclear energy.

by pdog 10y ago

loeg 10y ago

That can be mitigated in the US because the entire country doesn't run along a fault line. Not so Japan. Yes, don't build your nuclear reactor in western California.

WalterBright 10y ago
The Fukushima reactor stood the earthquake without damage, and could have been easily designed to withstand the tsunami. It was not. How, you might say? Put the backup generators in waterproof bunkers, or simply on platforms high enough to keep them dry. It's not expensive or tricky, it's just that the failure mode did not occur to anyone in charge.

bpodgursky 10y ago

Fukushima has demonstrated that relying on 60's technology and refusing to upgrade or invest because of political sensitivities exposes you to disasters 50 years down the line. It's like if everyone got afraid of airplanes in the 1980's and kept flying the same ones from the 60s through today because people were afraid to build new ones. Would you say air travel was unsafe, or that we made poor technology investments?

lispm 10y ago
Now you understand a tiny part of the Energy business. 'Nuclear' is not only a technical problem, it is a financial problem. Old plants will be run until they collapse - unless a regulator keeps the companies from doing that. But then the regulator comes onto pressure, because there is huge amount of money/corruption involved to keep the plant online. Every single plant is a multi-billion dollar investment, jobs, surrounding industry, ... Tepco from Fukushima claimed until the day their plants were hit, that everything was totally safe. Politics supported them. Nobody was questioning them.
- mpweiher 10y ago
  Yes, and despite the technical failings, the political failings and the corruption, the effects were comparatively benign.
  - sfifs 10y ago
    Possibly to you sitting on the other side of the world. Not so for the thousands of people displaced who lost their homes and communities through no fault of their own and might be exposed to higher cancer rates in their lifetimes.
    - mpweiher 10y ago
      Yes, the evacuation zone almost certainly should have been smaller, that's one of the perverse effects of the panic about nuclear, that the mitigation efforts tend to be overblown (not that they should be zero), and therefore the damage from the mitigation much worse than it needs to be. But you missed the word "comparatively". We have lots of human-/technology-induced deaths and injuries. We allow car traffic in our cities at speeds that kills and maims thousands, often children. These are completely avoidable, just lower speed limits to 5mph or less. The US allows more than ten thousand gun deaths every year, because "reasons". etc. etc. So yes, the effects were comparatively benign, compared to most of the technology we surround ourselves with, and certainly compared to all power-generating technologies we have (including solar). Not absolutely benign, though it would be interesting to compare the damage even of accidents like Fukushima to the benefits (in lives saved) of the electricity that was produced.
      - petre 10y ago
        There are people who have returned to their old residences inside the Chernobyl danger zone and they're doing just fine.
  - lispm 10y ago
    Right, it will cost only a few hundred billion dollars, maybe a trillion, to clean up the effects from the earthquake on the nuclear power plants. The country lost most of their nuclear power plants in a single day. It takes years, if not decades to bring them back online - partly. 50 plants. Each worth, say, ten billion dollar (current worth and future earnings - just an estimate). That loss alone goes into the hundreds of billions. Additionally fuel had to be imported, other plants had to be built. 'Currently 42 reactors are operable and potentially able to restart, and 24 of these are in the process of restart approvals. The first two restarted in August and October 2015.' Six years after the earthquake/tsunami. Only a few ten thousand people, maybe a hundred thousand, will work in Fukushima under extreme circumstances to keep the site stable and clean it up the site for the next five decades. Robots die regularly after a short time inside the reactors. Humans get a year worth radioactive exposure in a few hours. Where to get all the people needed to work there? We have experience to dismantle functioning reactors. Here we have damaged reactors with damaged fuel... Very little effects... I don't think so. The effects were much more severe than the industry thought. They were thinking that most of the reactors would operate again, by now. World-wide reactor projects were seeing delays. Companies have a hard time to survive. All these are effects of a single earthquake/tsunami on the nuclear reactor industry. It's a huge financial catastrophe for the nuclear industry and the countries financing it.
jacobush 10y ago
Actually, none of what you said refutes the parent post, rather proves the point. Humans as a group have demonstrated a lack of maturity handling nuclear power.
- throwanem 10y ago
  A lack of maturity by what standard? When we say such things of an individual, we do so by comparison with other individuals. With whom do you compare our entire species?
  - jacobush 10y ago
    I can at best give you a circular (or spiral, given that generations pass) argument: nuclear has not demonstrated that it has a great appeal to current stock of humans.
    - AstralStorm 10y ago
      It didn't because humans are not rational and bad press is highly overblown. Mostly because of link to weapons of mass destruction I suppose. Nobody says anything about the health and ecological disaster that is coal and oil. People do not attribute mining deaths to it and are bad at linking long term chronic health effects to them. A red herring of solar and wind is proposed that people haven't rejected due to outages thanks to the other technologies covering its major drawbacks. Likewise hydro disasters are not covered as much as they should.
- ageofwant 10y ago
  And demonstrated maturity by burning coal that as part of normal predictable operations kills thousands a year? Humans' continous insistence on burning coal instead of thorium may well be our Fermi filter.
  - jacobush 10y ago
    Of course not. Demonstrated even MORE immaturity by burning coal. Aliens discussing us: "are the earthlings burning coal for fuel? I thought you said they couldn't even handle nuclear fission?" "Yes dear Sklaar, it's even worse than we thought. Can you believe where they put the exhaust? Straight into the atmosphere!" And so it happened that Earth was put into another 1000 years of no-contact-policy at the latest board of review, kids...
mpweiher 10y ago
And even with all of these obvious and avoidable mistakes, there were no fatalities. In fact, it was Fukushima that turned me around on nuclear. I always thought that the risks were just too great, that if you weren't perfect there would be disasters of unimaginable proportions. And humans just aren't perfect. I was wrong. Well, not on the last bit :-)

mpweiher 10y ago

Dunno. The Tsunami killed upwards of 15000 people. I don't have figures, but I am sure that a good number of these were not killed by the wave directly, but by technical contraptions that failed, crushed them or what have you. One of these many technical contraptions that was damaged/destroyed by the Tsunami was the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Yet, so far not a single person has been killed as a result of that failure, and so far the predictions are that future deaths will be so low as to disappear into the statistical noise. (And these predictions tend to be on the high side: the WHO created reports every decade after Chernobyl, and each report massively revised those estimates downwards). Yet, all we ever hear about is Fukushima. Odd. That.

agroot12 10y ago
There would be more deaths if Japan and Tepco would not pour billions of dollars into collecting as much waste as possible. The waste of Fukushima is still an unsolved problem that will eat many billions more (see https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/world/asia/struggling-with-japans-nuclear-waste-six-years-after-disaster.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/world/asia/struggling-...). In fact, even when your reactor does NOT explode, you still have to manage the waste for 10,000 to 1,000,000 years (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Long_term_management_of_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Long_term_manage...). The radioactive materials are not only deadly due to their radiation; most of them are also highly toxic. So even without a meltdown, you risk many lives in the future. Just because not many people have died yet does not make it a safe energy choice. Who in their right mind can guarantee safe storage of the waste for 10,000+ years?
- 0xfeba 10y ago
  > So even without a meltdown, you risk many lives in the future. Just because not many people have died yet does not make it a safe energy choice. Even if that's true, compared to the certain deaths per year caused by coal it still wins out.
- vidarh 10y ago
  You don't need to be able to guarantee safe storage for 10,000+ years. For starters most of it can be reprocessed and reused, resulting in less dangerous waste. But no matter how reckless you decide to be with it, the amounts are small enough that it'll be nothing compared to the devastation caused by coal.

ekianjo 10y ago

We are still waiting for Fukushima nuclear event related deaths. The tsunami already killed 15000 people. Yeah, nuclear is super risky.

Turing_Machine 10y ago

1) Massive earthquake 2) Devastating tsunami 3) Crippling fire causing loss of power to all control circuitry. Even with all that, the number of direct radiation casualties was zero. There are about six workers who got more than a lifetime allowed dose of radiation. They may have an increased cancer risk. 1) How many do you suppose would have died had it been a hydroelectric dam of similar capacity? (hint: a lot more than six) 2) Just how safe does something have to be?

mizchief2 10y ago

We can stop building nuke plants on fault lines right on the coast without abandoning nuclear energy.