4 ms·

This is actually a proof that nuclear energy is not green, not safe, and should not be used any more. Nuclear plants can't resist direct airliner impact or big

by maigret 16y ago

This is actually a proof that nuclear energy is not green, not safe, and should not be used any more. Nuclear plants can't resist direct airliner impact or big earthquakes or anything that the engineer didn't think about.

geuis 16y ago
Merde, HN needs a redesign. I didn't mean to upvote this comment, sorry. Nuclear energy is like commercial airlines. Its a very safe kind of power, but sometimes there are accidents. Its unavoidable. More to your point, saying that a 747 hitting a cooling tower is a reason to abandon nuclear power is asinine. I the entire 100+ years of human flight, there have been exactly TWO instances of commercial planes hitting large human structures, and they both happened within a few minutes of each other in New York. To your other point, OF COURSE ENGINEERS THOUGHT ABOUT EARTHQUAKES. They're freaking NUCLEAR PLANTS. They don't build these things on fucking fault lines and then say "oops". They aren't franchise McDonald's that take 3 weeks to build and then ask if you want fries with your uranium. Any plant takes years, if not a decade in some cases, of zoning and study before they move a bull dozer onto a site. This earthquake SHIFTED THE ENTIRE PLANET. Its quite within the realm of being ok that a 40+ year old nuclear plant isn't handling being shaken by that kind of force very well.
- catshirt 16y ago
  the sum of my knowledge on nuclear energy and human flight is nearly nothing, so forgive me if i'm wrong... but comparatively, isn't the potential aftermath of a nuclear meltdown a bit more concerning than a plane crashing?
  - rosser 16y ago
    Planes crash far more often than reactors "melt down", so -- and I'm admittedly guessing here -- it's probably a wash, at least in terms of property damage. In terms of human cost (lives lost, injury, &c), plane crashes are far, far worse. All but the most egregious damage from radiation can be mitigated, if not prevented outright. If you're on a plane that's going down, or in the thing it's going to hit when it does, there's precisely fuck-all you can do about it.
  - geuis 16y ago
    Apologies catshirt. I just re-read my comment and I realize in retrospect my comment was WAY too aggressive and snarky. You might consider adding some contact info to your profile, as I was unable to email you with my apology directly.
    - catshirt 16y ago
      hey, not an issue, i didn't take it that way at all. i'm pretty tactless so i'm sure all my comments could be taken the same way. :)
- maigret 16y ago
  Please note that I have not said that earthquakes are not something they took into account, I've said beside earthquakes, terrorist attacks and anything, there is also an additional risk that no one can calculate. Every engineer knows that prevision has its limit. So it's all about inner danger. In case of an earthquake, a barrage could also break and make huge damages. What such an accident would not do, though, and what an airliner accident would also not do, is damaging big areas during decades in unknown ways. Of course they are risks, but if you look at the Rasmussen report, it tells a meltdown is likely happen all 20000 years per reactor. We have around 430 reactors over the world, so this event should happen every 46 years. It seems that this calculation is optimistic at best (if you don't take all the partial meltdowns into account) https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nuclear_meltd.... So I think we might need to reconsider nuclear energy - at least have a public debate on that topic. Also, using capitals don't serve your argument.
  - rosser 16y ago
    And what is a "melt down", but an accident at a reactor that causes damage to the reactor core. Nothing more. If a reactor core is damaged every 40-odd years, that's a pretty small price to pay for the terawatts it supplied during that span. Yes, sometimes other things happen, and the damage goes beyond the core. That's deeply unfortunate, and I feel for the people affected. But "melt down" is one of those loaded terms like "death tax" -- it serves more to create an image of unimaginable dire consequence in the lay mind than support informed debate.
  - ericd 16y ago
    No form of energy is entirely clean or risk free. To say that any risk of a relatively large accident is unacceptable is unrealistic. Look at what the use of oil caused in the Gulf of Mexico, let alone the environmental damage caused by the normal use of oil as a power source. Short of a breakthrough on fusion or something else exotic, nuclear power with modern designs is by far the best hope for decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels, and only with reprocessing (also unpopular) could it bear the burden for very long while being economical. It's a tragedy that this will be used as an example for why it should be locked away in a closet in the coming years. Believing that efficiency and saving can solve our energy problems is pretty naive, and taking away from the debate of the matter at hand.
rosser 16y ago
I'm trying to cobble together some statistics on the safety of nuclear power, but unfortunately, the IAEA site is slammed presently (wonder why...), so I'm left with assembling them by hand, from Wikipedia. If anyone out there can point me at a better source for this data, I'd be most grateful. As a preliminary indicator of my findings, I've gathered start-up dates (and shut-down dates for reactors that are no longer operational) for the 12 reactors in countries that start with "A", yielding some 322 reactor-years of operation. If 12 of the 500-ish civilian, non-experimental reactors, including decommissioned, in the world have a combined 322 reactor-years of criticality, let's guesstimate that there's been something on the order of 12000 reactor-years of criticality globally, across all non-experimental, non-military reactors. In that time, there have been 27 civilian nuclear "accidents" (defined as damage to persons or property directly attributable to something Going Wrong at a reactor), and 8 -- count them, eight -- "incidents" (defined as something Going Wrong at a reactor, but not causing damage to persons or property outside the plant, itself). (Again, this data is from Wikipedia, so its accuracy is open to debate.) Given the choice between one "accident" every 500-odd reactor-years (again, take that number with a cup of salt), and continually pumping ten gigatons of just CO2 into the atmosphere every year -- and that just from coal-burning power plants -- I know which I'd prefer. That said, I agree with you on one point: we damn well should be investing massively more than we are into "green" energy technology. Much of that is unproven, and often has its own set of ecological consequences. Even leaving that aside, the best estimates say it will be decades, at least, before any of it can even start to supplant current energy sources. What, exactly, should we do in the interim? (EDIT: math is hard past 0300.)
- maigret 16y ago
  You can have a look at another (rough) estimate I did on my answer to geuis. I agree with you, and as I stated in my other answer, things like barrage breakings (due to an equivalent earthquake) can be also devastating for civilization. What I think would be useful is to have a public look at the track record of nuclear and compare it's impact with other energies. Nuclear power is going to stay for now, and that's probably necessary with the current state of the technology, but do we really want to invest so many billion in it for the next 100 year? Is really nuclear our safest bet against climate change?
dmfdmf 16y ago
You are just demonstrating your ignorance. The reality is that the only choice to power industrial civilization is fossil fuels or nuclear power. Even if this accident results in a core melt, in the large sweep of history, it will hardly slow down the transition from oil to nuclear power.
- maigret 16y ago
  So you think that graph is wrong? https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:EIA2007_f4.jpg https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:EIA2007_...
  - dmfdmf 16y ago
    I thought we ran out of fossil fuel a few years ago?
    - maigret 16y ago
      Of cheap oil, yes. Dirty oil is still to be found, I don't know of a consensus yet on peak oil.
potatolicious 16y ago
The alternatives are even more dangerous, just not quite so visibly. For example: Coal ash produced by coal power plants actually release more radioactive waste than the equivalent power generated via nuclear. Not only that, nuclear waste is highly controlled and the general population has no contact with it save extremely rare catastrophes - compare with pumping this ash into the atmosphere. Not to mention that inhaling radioactive material is orders of magnitude more dangerous than physical contact. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is... Nuclear energy isn't perfect - but it's a hell of a lot better than anything else we've got.

by maigret 16y ago

geuis 16y ago

Merde, HN needs a redesign. I didn't mean to upvote this comment, sorry. Nuclear energy is like commercial airlines. Its a very safe kind of power, but sometimes there are accidents. Its unavoidable. More to your point, saying that a 747 hitting a cooling tower is a reason to abandon nuclear power is asinine. I the entire 100+ years of human flight, there have been exactly TWO instances of commercial planes hitting large human structures, and they both happened within a few minutes of each other in New York. To your other point, OF COURSE ENGINEERS THOUGHT ABOUT EARTHQUAKES. They're freaking NUCLEAR PLANTS. They don't build these things on fucking fault lines and then say "oops". They aren't franchise McDonald's that take 3 weeks to build and then ask if you want fries with your uranium. Any plant takes years, if not a decade in some cases, of zoning and study before they move a bull dozer onto a site. This earthquake SHIFTED THE ENTIRE PLANET. Its quite within the realm of being ok that a 40+ year old nuclear plant isn't handling being shaken by that kind of force very well.

catshirt 16y ago
the sum of my knowledge on nuclear energy and human flight is nearly nothing, so forgive me if i'm wrong... but comparatively, isn't the potential aftermath of a nuclear meltdown a bit more concerning than a plane crashing?
- rosser 16y ago
  Planes crash far more often than reactors "melt down", so -- and I'm admittedly guessing here -- it's probably a wash, at least in terms of property damage. In terms of human cost (lives lost, injury, &c), plane crashes are far, far worse. All but the most egregious damage from radiation can be mitigated, if not prevented outright. If you're on a plane that's going down, or in the thing it's going to hit when it does, there's precisely fuck-all you can do about it.
- geuis 16y ago
  Apologies catshirt. I just re-read my comment and I realize in retrospect my comment was WAY too aggressive and snarky. You might consider adding some contact info to your profile, as I was unable to email you with my apology directly.
  - catshirt 16y ago
    hey, not an issue, i didn't take it that way at all. i'm pretty tactless so i'm sure all my comments could be taken the same way. :)
maigret 16y ago
Please note that I have not said that earthquakes are not something they took into account, I've said beside earthquakes, terrorist attacks and anything, there is also an additional risk that no one can calculate. Every engineer knows that prevision has its limit. So it's all about inner danger. In case of an earthquake, a barrage could also break and make huge damages. What such an accident would not do, though, and what an airliner accident would also not do, is damaging big areas during decades in unknown ways. Of course they are risks, but if you look at the Rasmussen report, it tells a meltdown is likely happen all 20000 years per reactor. We have around 430 reactors over the world, so this event should happen every 46 years. It seems that this calculation is optimistic at best (if you don't take all the partial meltdowns into account) https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nuclear_meltd.... So I think we might need to reconsider nuclear energy - at least have a public debate on that topic. Also, using capitals don't serve your argument.
- rosser 16y ago
  And what is a "melt down", but an accident at a reactor that causes damage to the reactor core. Nothing more. If a reactor core is damaged every 40-odd years, that's a pretty small price to pay for the terawatts it supplied during that span. Yes, sometimes other things happen, and the damage goes beyond the core. That's deeply unfortunate, and I feel for the people affected. But "melt down" is one of those loaded terms like "death tax" -- it serves more to create an image of unimaginable dire consequence in the lay mind than support informed debate.
- ericd 16y ago
  No form of energy is entirely clean or risk free. To say that any risk of a relatively large accident is unacceptable is unrealistic. Look at what the use of oil caused in the Gulf of Mexico, let alone the environmental damage caused by the normal use of oil as a power source. Short of a breakthrough on fusion or something else exotic, nuclear power with modern designs is by far the best hope for decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels, and only with reprocessing (also unpopular) could it bear the burden for very long while being economical. It's a tragedy that this will be used as an example for why it should be locked away in a closet in the coming years. Believing that efficiency and saving can solve our energy problems is pretty naive, and taking away from the debate of the matter at hand.

rosser 16y ago

I'm trying to cobble together some statistics on the safety of nuclear power, but unfortunately, the IAEA site is slammed presently (wonder why...), so I'm left with assembling them by hand, from Wikipedia. If anyone out there can point me at a better source for this data, I'd be most grateful. As a preliminary indicator of my findings, I've gathered start-up dates (and shut-down dates for reactors that are no longer operational) for the 12 reactors in countries that start with "A", yielding some 322 reactor-years of operation. If 12 of the 500-ish civilian, non-experimental reactors, including decommissioned, in the world have a combined 322 reactor-years of criticality, let's guesstimate that there's been something on the order of 12000 reactor-years of criticality globally, across all non-experimental, non-military reactors. In that time, there have been 27 civilian nuclear "accidents" (defined as damage to persons or property directly attributable to something Going Wrong at a reactor), and 8 -- count them, eight -- "incidents" (defined as something Going Wrong at a reactor, but not causing damage to persons or property outside the plant, itself). (Again, this data is from Wikipedia, so its accuracy is open to debate.) Given the choice between one "accident" every 500-odd reactor-years (again, take that number with a cup of salt), and continually pumping ten gigatons of just CO2 into the atmosphere every year -- and that just from coal-burning power plants -- I know which I'd prefer. That said, I agree with you on one point: we damn well should be investing massively more than we are into "green" energy technology. Much of that is unproven, and often has its own set of ecological consequences. Even leaving that aside, the best estimates say it will be decades, at least, before any of it can even start to supplant current energy sources. What, exactly, should we do in the interim? (EDIT: math is hard past 0300.)

maigret 16y ago
You can have a look at another (rough) estimate I did on my answer to geuis. I agree with you, and as I stated in my other answer, things like barrage breakings (due to an equivalent earthquake) can be also devastating for civilization. What I think would be useful is to have a public look at the track record of nuclear and compare it's impact with other energies. Nuclear power is going to stay for now, and that's probably necessary with the current state of the technology, but do we really want to invest so many billion in it for the next 100 year? Is really nuclear our safest bet against climate change?

dmfdmf 16y ago

You are just demonstrating your ignorance. The reality is that the only choice to power industrial civilization is fossil fuels or nuclear power. Even if this accident results in a core melt, in the large sweep of history, it will hardly slow down the transition from oil to nuclear power.

maigret 16y ago
So you think that graph is wrong? https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:EIA2007_f4.jpg https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:EIA2007_...
- dmfdmf 16y ago
  I thought we ran out of fossil fuel a few years ago?
  - maigret 16y ago
    Of cheap oil, yes. Dirty oil is still to be found, I don't know of a consensus yet on peak oil.

potatolicious 16y ago

The alternatives are even more dangerous, just not quite so visibly. For example: Coal ash produced by coal power plants actually release more radioactive waste than the equivalent power generated via nuclear. Not only that, nuclear waste is highly controlled and the general population has no contact with it save extremely rare catastrophes - compare with pumping this ash into the atmosphere. Not to mention that inhaling radioactive material is orders of magnitude more dangerous than physical contact. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is... Nuclear energy isn't perfect - but it's a hell of a lot better than anything else we've got.