12 ms·

Why Fukushima made me pro nukes

70 points by daniel02216 16y ago

hartror 16y ago
I heartily agree with the main premise that Fukushima should be held up as a success story of the nuclear energy sector. However I found the whole local production vs grid section is a bit weak, certainly there are merits to both and each solution alone is not the answer.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  There's a relatively simple way to settle the right mix of local or centralised generation. Let people pay for whichever they prefer.
  - tb 16y ago
    It's not that simple, because you have to factor in all the negative externalities. That's what got us into this mess in the first place, people aren't paying the full cost of the planetary resources they are using.
    - jacques_chester 16y ago
      I actually considered mentioning a carbon tax, but figured it would derail the discussion.
- lispm 16y ago
  Hmm, a large multi-billion dollar wreck is a success story? that's a nuclear powered reality distortion field.
  - jacques_chester 16y ago
    At this stage it seems that it will cost more to clean up BP's Gulf of Mexico spill than the aftermath Fukushima.
    - lispm 16y ago
      And? How do you clean up the area around the reactors? How far? What would it cost? When will the evacuated people return to their homes? What will it cost to clean up the reactors? What will it cost to replace them? How long will it take to build new nuclear reactors and where? Who will pay the japanese people the loss of property due to radioactive contanimation?
      - khafra 16y ago
        Those are all legitimate questions, but I think they all have extremely legitimate parallels in BP's gulf fiasco. For instance, who pays Japanese for the loss of contaminated property? I don't know, but the loss of livelihood for thousands of gulf fishermen, lost revenues for vacation spots, and ongoing destruction of habitat for things I like to eat is basically a write-off.
vacri 16y ago
1) The story is not complete yet. 2) Things other than a simple count of short-term fatalies matter. How about we do a deal: stop deciding whether Fukishima is a good or bad thing at least until it's completely under control. We've already had the darkly amusing round where the pro-nuclear have said "See, perfectly safe, no nuclear explosion" and then there was one. Wait for the chapter to be finished before claiming win or loss.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  The story isn't complete, but already it's being used by critics of nuclear to prove that nuclear is unsafe. Fatalities is an objective, verifiable measure of safety. If you want to compare apples to apples, you might look at fatalities attributable (including statistical estimates) per TWh since the introduction of nuclear power. Watt for watt and year for year nuclear has been safer to date than coal, oil, gas, hydro, solar, wind and biomass. http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...
  - jbm 16y ago
    Nuclear power is clearly unsafe, it's just a question of whether or not it is more unsafe than the other alternatives. This accident doesn't need to prove that, the fact was apparent the first time someone lit a match. However, Nuclear Power does have a special need to prove its case in the aftermath of this incident. Just look at the economic damage from the Fukushima issue. Other than the flight of foreigners out of Tokyo (fear + uncertainty is inevitable with the notoriously closed Japanese nuclear industry), there are issues with farming in Japan's third or fourth largest farming area, medium-term damage to energy output ("All eggs in one basket"), damage to businesses in Tokyo & environs (Rotating power outages, etc..). Summer in Tokyo will be HELL without air conditioners. I think It's pretty obvious Japan needs nuclear power. A future without 20% of Japan's energy sources is a non-starter. I'm sure the power-downs & practical alternatives (fossil fuels) will show that decisively. However, putting so much generating capacity in one location in an earthquake & tsunami prone country is a mistake. Maybe mini-nuclear plants are what we need going forward. Maybe we need less nuclear and more renewable power. Maybe something else. However, what we don't need is people outside of Japan using this life-and-death situation to promote energy politics, be it green, nuclear or otherwise. The geographical & historical context is completely different. (Ontario will never be hit with giant 8 meter Tsunamis after a 9.0 earthquake.)
FirstHopSystems 16y ago
I always thought that the reactors survived a tsunami and a earthquake at the same time was pretty good. Damaged but still intact, I do think it will take awhile for the whole picture to emerge on what took place. It seems most of the news about the nuclear hazards are an echo chamber so there might be some real danger. Most of the safety systems were wiped out and it's still standing? I had imaged the reactor turning into a roman candle launching fuel rods all over the place. The entire picture has yet to emerge and yet people are talking about it like the show is over. But then again most people commenting about the situation are pretty far away from Japan. Myself: I'm sitting in California. I'm sure if the San Onfre Plant started venting a small amount of radiation I would get a little edgy including a shift in perspective An out of control/damaged nuclear plant is still a out of control/damaged nuclear plant. Radiation leakage or no radiation leakage. I would be mad if any radiation came my way due to someone cutting corners or just not caring, no matter the dosage.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  > An out of control/damaged nuclear plant is still a out of control/damaged nuclear plant. Indeed. To borrow a meme from elsewhere, TRWTF is that the design requires active cooling for safe operation. Fukushima has proved that any safety system requiring active operation will inevitably fail. The worst failure mode is meltdown, which the containment vessel would catch as the final line of defence (a la Three Mile Island), but it shouldn't have gotten this far in the first place. That said, Fukushima is a 40-year-old design. Hopefully it'll be replaced with something with more passive safety.
  - FirstHopSystems 16y ago
    Agreed, There is always going to be risk involved with nuclear power. Your trying to contain something that will kill you if it has the chance. During a nuclear emergency they should release laughing babies and kittens. Only one of the two might try to kill you. The only problem is you can't tell which one. Upside: Laughing Babies and Kittens!!! I could only theorize you could use some sort of backup turbine built into the containment vessel. Then again if your not sure what kind of damage is done having something that is self powering might not be a good idea if it's out of control.
michaelochurch 16y ago
Nuclear power is necessary to provide "bridge" energy until we can go fully green. We don't have the resources yet to meet all our needs using green energy sources, and nuclear is far better than fossil fuels. Also, modern nuclear plant designs don't have any of the dangers that reactors like TMI and Fukushima had. Those relied on active safety-- that is, there is something that must be done to stop the reaction, and if the safety devices fail or if some input, such as electric power, becomes unavailable, it becomes difficult to stop. Modern designs (pebble bed, thorium) have passive safety (i.e. the reaction stops if not continually supported).
- patio11 16y ago
  No, that isn't correct. Fukushima (along with every reactor on the eastern half of Honshu) failed into quench, within seconds, exactly as designed, as a consequence of the earthquake rattling a system around the control rods which is intentionally designed to only keep them out of the reactor by continued effort. All the problems were caused by waste heat, rather than ongoing criticality (which would have produced 20 times the heat and been a much, much scarier proposition for the teams on site).
  - CountSessine 16y ago
    Pebble bed in particular, if I recall, is passively safe precisely because it resists waste heat.
    - pjscott 16y ago
      Let's be more precise here: some of the pebble bed designs offer passive decay heat removal. The PB-AHTR, for example, gets this handy property from its choice of coolant and geometry.
  - michaelochurch 16y ago
    I might be using the term "passive safety" incorrectly, but I wouldn't call a design "safe" if, even after criticality ended, there was still enough heat/pressure to cause explosions that subject nearby people to high levels of radiation. There's no doubt in my mind that Fukushima is far better designed and in much better operating order than Chernobyl (a terrible comparison for a number of reasons) was.
afterburner 16y ago
By buying nuclear plants now, we lock into today's nuclear technology for the next 50 years (nuclear plants have 40-50 year life cycles). By investing heavily in renewables and a new power grid, we can continually improve renewable generation and incrementally add to and improve existing facilities. Also, when a disaster happens, we can go "uh oh, 100 windmills fell over; man, we better wait until it's safe to go fix/replace them" instead "holy shit this could turn into a disaster right now unless we frantically try to control the situation and in doing so put several workers' lives in immediate and horrible risk!" Every dollar wasted on nuclear power is a lost opportunity. Renewables can be vastly improved, several advances have already been made just not fully capitalized on. Nuclear power doesn't show the same promise. Maybe in 50 years it will, but now it looks like same old same old. In the meantime I keep reading how advances in solar cell technology and long distance power grids can tap into more energy than perhaps most expect.
- light3 16y ago
  'Renewables can be vastly improved, several advances have already been made just not fully capitalized on' such as? I think the major advantage of nuclear is its cost efficiency and low pollution.
  - afterburner 16y ago
    If you insist on a cited post, lead by example.
    - light3 16y ago
      Firstly I didn't ask for citation, I asked for examples. Secondly, I gave my opinion which I think is based on accepted facts, if you insist on citations you can find them on Wikipedia. You just gave a statement, wrote your proposition on that statement, with nothing to back it up.
      - afterburner 16y ago
        Yeah, same as you. I'd debate your unsupported statement about cost efficiency. See my post below about the bids for Ontario nuclear expansion two years ago.
corin_ 16y ago
Anyone who doesn't know that "nukes" refers to weapons not power sources should perhaps steer clear of offering opinions on the subject. I stopped reading after this line: Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. Firstly, "some greens"? A surprisingly snide remark from someone who only just become pro-nuclear. Secondly, that's not even the point he then goes on to make? His argument is that what happened in Japan is below the safety guidelines. The worry of people who are anti-nuclear is that there is a possibility that something could happen to put the radiation levels above what is safe. I'm not anti-nuclear personally, but the worry I have isn't that, if a small amount of radiation leaks for some reason that it will have worse effects than believed by scientists. My worry is that the accident/whatever could cause the leaks to be far higher, if that happens it will be a very real problem.
- FirstHopSystems 16y ago
  This makes me feel like someone who ran across a few lanes of a freeway survived, then proclaimed, All freeways are safe. I didn't get hit!.
- light3 16y ago
  I don't see what's so snide about 'some greens', the Greens are a political party in Australia, they have a strong anti-nuclear stance as I recall(might be wrong).
  - corin_ 16y ago
    We have a Green Party in the UK too, but "some greens" would generally be said in a negative way, and referring to people with environmental concerns rather that just Green Party supported. Even about a political party - if someone who until just now was a tory MP said "some tories think..." and then went on to dismiss their views I'd make the same point. Maybe I took it the wrong way, but that's how it read to me. Either way seems like a fairly nonsense article.
    - sliverstorm 16y ago
      You can't argue that because 'some greens' is offensive in the UK, an article written in Australia saying 'some greens' is offensive. You are free to feel offended, but that doesn't mean the author is at fault.
feral 16y ago
This article is bad. There will always be unknown unknowns. One such happened in Fukushima - an earthquake and tsunami exceeding design specifications; the earthquake logarithmically so. This resulted in near total defeat of the safety protocols. Layers of containment designed never to be breached, were breached. Rods in the nearby cooling pools even got hot. Fundamentally, the plant operators lost control of the situation. Yes, its probable the final number of lives lost will be low. But, almost all the safety mechanisms were breached. With slightly more misfortune (perhaps another hydrogen explosion), much radiation could have been released, and many could have died. Anyone (like Monbiot, the author) who argues that this incident increases faith in the safety of the nuclear power plant needs to read Feynman's minority report on the shuttle disaster. When the safety systems, designed never to be breached at all, are 50% breached, you do not have a 50% margin of error. You have an extremely serious problem. Is nuclear fisson probably going to be our medium term energy source? Yes; there are few better alternatives. But we are going to have to be very careful about how we build them. Finally, while I am not attacking nuclear power here, it is erroneous to reason about the relative safeties of technologies based purely on the historical track record. What we should be thinking about is what the risk is in future; not what it has been in the past. If I told you I had an energy source that had a known 0.01% of ending the world, each year, but a clean 50 year track record, would you allow me to continue with it? Of course not! We must not make inferences about possible risks based purely on the track record, with no regard for improbable, but perhaps catastrophic, scenarios. Thankfully, nuclear power is not the doomsday energy source some people make out; and I'm not arguing against it - just against the specious reasoning.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  > Finally, while I am not attacking nuclear power here, it is erroneous to reason about the relative safeties of technologies based purely on the historical track record. I'm the one who made that argument. That the safety systems failed points to the systemic flaw in Fukushima: it requires active safety. Better designs, such as those developed in the 40 years since Fukushima was started up, rely on the operation of physical laws to maintain safety in the event of a reactor emergency (edit: It's since been pointed out to me these only lengthen the window of reaction time, but do not remove the necessity to provide active cooling eventually). It is not specious reasoning to point out that these designs would be even safer than a flawed design which has so far (with active management) survived an event far above its engineering specifications. The problem with calculating unknown risks based on imaginable catastrophic consequences is that 1) the scope of imagination is large and 2) interested parties to the estimate can skew it up or down. The best known example of this problem is Pascal's Wager.
lispm 16y ago
Is that satire?
molecule 16y ago
currently in or traveling to tokyo or fukushima soon, submitter or author?
Derbasti 16y ago
Any technology that makes awful natural disasters worse, is not a technology I want to have around. Also, a technology that makes it impossible for humans to be close to it in event of failure, is a bad idea.

70 points by daniel02216 16y ago

I heartily agree with the main premise that Fukushima should be held up as a success story of the nuclear energy sector. However I found the whole local production vs grid section is a bit weak, certainly there are merits to both and each solution alone is not the answer.

jacques_chester 16y ago
There's a relatively simple way to settle the right mix of local or centralised generation. Let people pay for whichever they prefer.
- tb 16y ago
  It's not that simple, because you have to factor in all the negative externalities. That's what got us into this mess in the first place, people aren't paying the full cost of the planetary resources they are using.
  - jacques_chester 16y ago
    I actually considered mentioning a carbon tax, but figured it would derail the discussion.
lispm 16y ago
Hmm, a large multi-billion dollar wreck is a success story? that's a nuclear powered reality distortion field.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  At this stage it seems that it will cost more to clean up BP's Gulf of Mexico spill than the aftermath Fukushima.
  - lispm 16y ago
    And? How do you clean up the area around the reactors? How far? What would it cost? When will the evacuated people return to their homes? What will it cost to clean up the reactors? What will it cost to replace them? How long will it take to build new nuclear reactors and where? Who will pay the japanese people the loss of property due to radioactive contanimation?
    - khafra 16y ago
      Those are all legitimate questions, but I think they all have extremely legitimate parallels in BP's gulf fiasco. For instance, who pays Japanese for the loss of contaminated property? I don't know, but the loss of livelihood for thousands of gulf fishermen, lost revenues for vacation spots, and ongoing destruction of habitat for things I like to eat is basically a write-off.

vacri 16y ago

1) The story is not complete yet. 2) Things other than a simple count of short-term fatalies matter. How about we do a deal: stop deciding whether Fukishima is a good or bad thing at least until it's completely under control. We've already had the darkly amusing round where the pro-nuclear have said "See, perfectly safe, no nuclear explosion" and then there was one. Wait for the chapter to be finished before claiming win or loss.

jacques_chester 16y ago
The story isn't complete, but already it's being used by critics of nuclear to prove that nuclear is unsafe. Fatalities is an objective, verifiable measure of safety. If you want to compare apples to apples, you might look at fatalities attributable (including statistical estimates) per TWh since the introduction of nuclear power. Watt for watt and year for year nuclear has been safer to date than coal, oil, gas, hydro, solar, wind and biomass. http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...
- jbm 16y ago
  Nuclear power is clearly unsafe, it's just a question of whether or not it is more unsafe than the other alternatives. This accident doesn't need to prove that, the fact was apparent the first time someone lit a match. However, Nuclear Power does have a special need to prove its case in the aftermath of this incident. Just look at the economic damage from the Fukushima issue. Other than the flight of foreigners out of Tokyo (fear + uncertainty is inevitable with the notoriously closed Japanese nuclear industry), there are issues with farming in Japan's third or fourth largest farming area, medium-term damage to energy output ("All eggs in one basket"), damage to businesses in Tokyo & environs (Rotating power outages, etc..). Summer in Tokyo will be HELL without air conditioners. I think It's pretty obvious Japan needs nuclear power. A future without 20% of Japan's energy sources is a non-starter. I'm sure the power-downs & practical alternatives (fossil fuels) will show that decisively. However, putting so much generating capacity in one location in an earthquake & tsunami prone country is a mistake. Maybe mini-nuclear plants are what we need going forward. Maybe we need less nuclear and more renewable power. Maybe something else. However, what we don't need is people outside of Japan using this life-and-death situation to promote energy politics, be it green, nuclear or otherwise. The geographical & historical context is completely different. (Ontario will never be hit with giant 8 meter Tsunamis after a 9.0 earthquake.)

FirstHopSystems 16y ago

I always thought that the reactors survived a tsunami and a earthquake at the same time was pretty good. Damaged but still intact, I do think it will take awhile for the whole picture to emerge on what took place. It seems most of the news about the nuclear hazards are an echo chamber so there might be some real danger. Most of the safety systems were wiped out and it's still standing? I had imaged the reactor turning into a roman candle launching fuel rods all over the place. The entire picture has yet to emerge and yet people are talking about it like the show is over. But then again most people commenting about the situation are pretty far away from Japan. Myself: I'm sitting in California. I'm sure if the San Onfre Plant started venting a small amount of radiation I would get a little edgy including a shift in perspective An out of control/damaged nuclear plant is still a out of control/damaged nuclear plant. Radiation leakage or no radiation leakage. I would be mad if any radiation came my way due to someone cutting corners or just not caring, no matter the dosage.

jacques_chester 16y ago
> An out of control/damaged nuclear plant is still a out of control/damaged nuclear plant. Indeed. To borrow a meme from elsewhere, TRWTF is that the design requires active cooling for safe operation. Fukushima has proved that any safety system requiring active operation will inevitably fail. The worst failure mode is meltdown, which the containment vessel would catch as the final line of defence (a la Three Mile Island), but it shouldn't have gotten this far in the first place. That said, Fukushima is a 40-year-old design. Hopefully it'll be replaced with something with more passive safety.
- FirstHopSystems 16y ago
  Agreed, There is always going to be risk involved with nuclear power. Your trying to contain something that will kill you if it has the chance. During a nuclear emergency they should release laughing babies and kittens. Only one of the two might try to kill you. The only problem is you can't tell which one. Upside: Laughing Babies and Kittens!!! I could only theorize you could use some sort of backup turbine built into the containment vessel. Then again if your not sure what kind of damage is done having something that is self powering might not be a good idea if it's out of control.

michaelochurch 16y ago

Nuclear power is necessary to provide "bridge" energy until we can go fully green. We don't have the resources yet to meet all our needs using green energy sources, and nuclear is far better than fossil fuels. Also, modern nuclear plant designs don't have any of the dangers that reactors like TMI and Fukushima had. Those relied on active safety-- that is, there is something that must be done to stop the reaction, and if the safety devices fail or if some input, such as electric power, becomes unavailable, it becomes difficult to stop. Modern designs (pebble bed, thorium) have passive safety (i.e. the reaction stops if not continually supported).

patio11 16y ago
No, that isn't correct. Fukushima (along with every reactor on the eastern half of Honshu) failed into quench, within seconds, exactly as designed, as a consequence of the earthquake rattling a system around the control rods which is intentionally designed to only keep them out of the reactor by continued effort. All the problems were caused by waste heat, rather than ongoing criticality (which would have produced 20 times the heat and been a much, much scarier proposition for the teams on site).
- CountSessine 16y ago
  Pebble bed in particular, if I recall, is passively safe precisely because it resists waste heat.
  - pjscott 16y ago
    Let's be more precise here: some of the pebble bed designs offer passive decay heat removal. The PB-AHTR, for example, gets this handy property from its choice of coolant and geometry.
- michaelochurch 16y ago
  I might be using the term "passive safety" incorrectly, but I wouldn't call a design "safe" if, even after criticality ended, there was still enough heat/pressure to cause explosions that subject nearby people to high levels of radiation. There's no doubt in my mind that Fukushima is far better designed and in much better operating order than Chernobyl (a terrible comparison for a number of reasons) was.

afterburner 16y ago

By buying nuclear plants now, we lock into today's nuclear technology for the next 50 years (nuclear plants have 40-50 year life cycles). By investing heavily in renewables and a new power grid, we can continually improve renewable generation and incrementally add to and improve existing facilities. Also, when a disaster happens, we can go "uh oh, 100 windmills fell over; man, we better wait until it's safe to go fix/replace them" instead "holy shit this could turn into a disaster right now unless we frantically try to control the situation and in doing so put several workers' lives in immediate and horrible risk!" Every dollar wasted on nuclear power is a lost opportunity. Renewables can be vastly improved, several advances have already been made just not fully capitalized on. Nuclear power doesn't show the same promise. Maybe in 50 years it will, but now it looks like same old same old. In the meantime I keep reading how advances in solar cell technology and long distance power grids can tap into more energy than perhaps most expect.

light3 16y ago
'Renewables can be vastly improved, several advances have already been made just not fully capitalized on' such as? I think the major advantage of nuclear is its cost efficiency and low pollution.
- afterburner 16y ago
  If you insist on a cited post, lead by example.
  - light3 16y ago
    Firstly I didn't ask for citation, I asked for examples. Secondly, I gave my opinion which I think is based on accepted facts, if you insist on citations you can find them on Wikipedia. You just gave a statement, wrote your proposition on that statement, with nothing to back it up.
    - afterburner 16y ago
      Yeah, same as you. I'd debate your unsupported statement about cost efficiency. See my post below about the bids for Ontario nuclear expansion two years ago.

corin_ 16y ago

Anyone who doesn't know that "nukes" refers to weapons not power sources should perhaps steer clear of offering opinions on the subject. I stopped reading after this line: Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. Firstly, "some greens"? A surprisingly snide remark from someone who only just become pro-nuclear. Secondly, that's not even the point he then goes on to make? His argument is that what happened in Japan is below the safety guidelines. The worry of people who are anti-nuclear is that there is a possibility that something could happen to put the radiation levels above what is safe. I'm not anti-nuclear personally, but the worry I have isn't that, if a small amount of radiation leaks for some reason that it will have worse effects than believed by scientists. My worry is that the accident/whatever could cause the leaks to be far higher, if that happens it will be a very real problem.

FirstHopSystems 16y ago
This makes me feel like someone who ran across a few lanes of a freeway survived, then proclaimed, All freeways are safe. I didn't get hit!.
light3 16y ago
I don't see what's so snide about 'some greens', the Greens are a political party in Australia, they have a strong anti-nuclear stance as I recall(might be wrong).
- corin_ 16y ago
  We have a Green Party in the UK too, but "some greens" would generally be said in a negative way, and referring to people with environmental concerns rather that just Green Party supported. Even about a political party - if someone who until just now was a tory MP said "some tories think..." and then went on to dismiss their views I'd make the same point. Maybe I took it the wrong way, but that's how it read to me. Either way seems like a fairly nonsense article.
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    You can't argue that because 'some greens' is offensive in the UK, an article written in Australia saying 'some greens' is offensive. You are free to feel offended, but that doesn't mean the author is at fault.

feral 16y ago

This article is bad. There will always be unknown unknowns. One such happened in Fukushima - an earthquake and tsunami exceeding design specifications; the earthquake logarithmically so. This resulted in near total defeat of the safety protocols. Layers of containment designed never to be breached, were breached. Rods in the nearby cooling pools even got hot. Fundamentally, the plant operators lost control of the situation. Yes, its probable the final number of lives lost will be low. But, almost all the safety mechanisms were breached. With slightly more misfortune (perhaps another hydrogen explosion), much radiation could have been released, and many could have died. Anyone (like Monbiot, the author) who argues that this incident increases faith in the safety of the nuclear power plant needs to read Feynman's minority report on the shuttle disaster. When the safety systems, designed never to be breached at all, are 50% breached, you do not have a 50% margin of error. You have an extremely serious problem. Is nuclear fisson probably going to be our medium term energy source? Yes; there are few better alternatives. But we are going to have to be very careful about how we build them. Finally, while I am not attacking nuclear power here, it is erroneous to reason about the relative safeties of technologies based purely on the historical track record. What we should be thinking about is what the risk is in future; not what it has been in the past. If I told you I had an energy source that had a known 0.01% of ending the world, each year, but a clean 50 year track record, would you allow me to continue with it? Of course not! We must not make inferences about possible risks based purely on the track record, with no regard for improbable, but perhaps catastrophic, scenarios. Thankfully, nuclear power is not the doomsday energy source some people make out; and I'm not arguing against it - just against the specious reasoning.

jacques_chester 16y ago
> Finally, while I am not attacking nuclear power here, it is erroneous to reason about the relative safeties of technologies based purely on the historical track record. I'm the one who made that argument. That the safety systems failed points to the systemic flaw in Fukushima: it requires active safety. Better designs, such as those developed in the 40 years since Fukushima was started up, rely on the operation of physical laws to maintain safety in the event of a reactor emergency (edit: It's since been pointed out to me these only lengthen the window of reaction time, but do not remove the necessity to provide active cooling eventually). It is not specious reasoning to point out that these designs would be even safer than a flawed design which has so far (with active management) survived an event far above its engineering specifications. The problem with calculating unknown risks based on imaginable catastrophic consequences is that 1) the scope of imagination is large and 2) interested parties to the estimate can skew it up or down. The best known example of this problem is Pascal's Wager.

lispm 16y ago

Is that satire?

molecule 16y ago

currently in or traveling to tokyo or fukushima soon, submitter or author?

Derbasti 16y ago

Any technology that makes awful natural disasters worse, is not a technology I want to have around. Also, a technology that makes it impossible for humans to be close to it in event of failure, is a bad idea.