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I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Look at Fukushima for example. It seems hard to imagine a nuclear power plant design, e

by tbenst 6y ago

I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Look at Fukushima for example. It seems hard to imagine a nuclear power plant design, even Gen III or IV that would be immune to any possible natural disaster. Analysis of nuclear power should take into account Black Swan events: no matter how well designed, some fraction of plants will cause INES Level 7 disasters. If the resulting cost (ie $100s of billions for cleanup), environmental damage, and health impacts are still less than wind or solar, I’m all for it, but pro-nuclear arguments continuously give the tired argument that with new designs “this time is different.”

etrautmann 6y ago
Yes, and even when you consider those costs, it pales in comparison to the lives lost and negative externalities of coal, oil, and gas usage. These include climate change, particulate pollution, environmental release of mercury, devastation of vast swaths of the environment worldwide, and other factors that may be hard to quantify but negatively impactful.
- matwood 6y ago
  There was a post on HN the other day that talked about how hard it is for humans to see beyond direct first order effects. Once you get to indirect or N order effects, it's nearly impossible for humans to fully appreciate. People see nuclear and it's easy to draw a straight line accident -> damage. People know about mercury is seafood, but they can't seem to attach fossil fuel burning to that problem even when told. It's a disconnect that I hope as a species we will one day figure out. Global warming and weather changes? Good luck.
  - r00fus 6y ago
    It helped that there was a whole campaign propped up by the fossil fuel companies to demonize nuclear. Don't get me wrong - I think there are issues with nuclear - primarily the waste heat - generally ruins the rivers or other local bodies of water even assuming radioactive waste is contained.
- legulere 6y ago
  There’s already a disinvestment in fossil fuel going on. You have to compare nuclear with renewables.
  - defnotashton2 6y ago
    Your assuming we can run on renewable, which we can't, and won't be able to in our life time. Germany is a good example.
    - IshKebab 6y ago
      I don't see why not. Renewables are already cheaper than nuclear. The only issue is the fact that it is intermittent and we don't have cheap enormous batteries yet. But that can probably be solved by over-provisioning, long distance HVDC power lines, and gas power stations as backup.
    - legulere 6y ago
      How is Germany a good example? Renewables were less than 20% 10 years ago and are now more than 50%. Meanwhile it has one of the most stable electricity network. https://www.energy-charts.de/energy_pie_de.htm?year=2020 https://www.energy-charts.de/energy_pie_de.htm?year=2020
      - p_l 6y ago
        The 50% is for peak renewable usage. To keep grid stability, Germany depends a lot on French nuclear power plants, imports from elsewhere (usually not green), and ridiculously dirty lignite power plants with natural gas for load following. And they are building more and more gas power plants and can't really decrease the amount of dirty coal (lignite fueled power plants make other coal-fired power plants look clean)
        legulere 6y ago
        Did you actually look at the link that I posted? Those are the numbers for all of 2020. Germany doesn’t depend on French nuclear power. Germany was a net exporter to France in many of the last years. Many neighboring countries have even higher percentage of renewables (Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Norway which is connected via nord.link). Even though I would have shit down fossil fuel power plants before nuclear, Germany still manages to decrease fossil energy use in their energy mix: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei:Energiemix_Deutschland.svg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei:Energi...
- tbenst 6y ago
  Agreed. The question I meant to raise was nuclear power versus other alternative energy sources, eg wind/solar/hydropower/geothermal. Comparisons of nuclear power to these other sources are typically dishonest in that they do not account for nuclear disasters. This may be an acceptable risk but it needs to at least be included in analysis, say one disaster per 100 operating years (my estimate of this value: 1 in 50-500 years). Globally, there’s only 440 operating nuclear power plants and there’s been ~100 nuclear disasters. In the last 20 years, there have been at least 6 nuclear plant disasters that cause more than $100 million in property damage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
  - lucb1e 6y ago
    > The question I meant to raise was nuclear power versus other [renewable sources] (I'll assume this is still about safety, as the comment you're referring to with "meant to raise" started with "I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe".) As far as I have read, nuclear is the safest option barring none. There are so few nuclear accidents that the casualties are a rounding error and the confidence is low. But that is not the only thing we're optimizing for. What we need is to have a lower environmental impact so that later generations shall live long and prosper. Wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear all fit that bill right now. Eventually we'll get rid of fission, perhaps in favor of fusion or perhaps of 100% renewables. Given that we didn't do a large effort in the past few decades on shutting down carbon-based power generation and building 100% renewable green energy without nuclear, and we aren't managing to do it fast enough today, either, we need to make big steps to get there without fighting a billion small battles: one person doesn't like the sight of solar panels on the neighbours' roof (e.g. my dad), another doesn't like a wind turbine in their back yard, hydro power has environmental concerns and doesn't work everywhere... etc. We don't have time for this. Heck, we also don't have the time necessary to build nuclear power plants, but I just don't see any other option than to start now and finally cut down on carbon emissions. If you're not convinced by nuclear, fine: by all means let us build renewable energy sources at the rate warranted to limit the impact of this climate disaster. I'm just not sure we'll be fast enough.
himinlomax 6y ago
> Look at Fukushima for example. It seems hard to imagine a nuclear power plant design, even Gen III or IV that would be immune to any possible natural disaster. For Fukushima, it seems that the panicked response of the local authorities (evacuating the whole area ...) was what caused the most problems.
- wazoox 6y ago
  Exactly zero people died because of radiation at Fukushima. And keep in mind that if the entire exclusion zone was covered with solar panels, it wouldn't produce nearly as much power annually as the nuclear plant did.
- bluquark 6y ago
  The magnitude and extent of the radioactive release was largely unknowable in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. The local authorities were put in an impossible position, either gamble with everyone's health or evacuate at great cost. The root cause of the dilemma is that the worst case scenario for traditional nuclear is so severe and nobody can tell decision-makers with high confidence whether or not you've just hit it.
  - infogulch 6y ago
    The fundamental, unsolvable difficulty of making decisions with imperfect information seems to be often under analyzed. Are there any related fields that study this decision making difficulty?
    - patrickfreed 6y ago
      professional poker
    - john-shaffer 6y ago
      I highly recommend "Probability Theory" by E.T. Jaynes. Don't be fooled by the generic title - the book is my Bible for reasoning with uncertainty. > In my opinion, this book is a required read for anyone who wishes to understand precisely how the scientific worldview is, in a mathematically defensible sense, the best possible worldview, the one that lets us optimally use evidence to develop an interlocked Bayesian network of evidence supported beliefs that can change and evolve as the evidence is accumulated. It also shows the critical connections between physics and statistical mechanics and Shannon's theorem in computational information theory, laying the foundation for a fair bit of modern physics as it demonstrates that physical entropy and information entropy are very much one and the same thing, from a certain point of view.
wnevets 6y ago
No one likes to talk about it however the Fukushima disaster could have been prevented with current technology but it was cheaper in the short term not to. Even IF you could have a super safe design a huge part of the problem was the lack of maintenance and actually implementing the safety designs they had. [1] Why would anyone trust these companies to actually do what is right at the cost of the bottom line? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#Prior_safety_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
- roenxi 6y ago
  No-one talks about it because it isn't relevant. The fact that a 1970s plant didn't get every safety upgrade over the course of 40 years is possible. But if you do a cost-benifit analysis of nuclear power and just add Fukushima to the cost column it is still an absurdly good idea to go nuclear. The status quo we currently enjoy is comparable to the worst-case in nuclear. If we applied nuclear safety standards I suspect coal fired power plants would have an exclusion zone too; they cause a lot of pollution and the health impacts around them are detectable.
  - wnevets 6y ago
    >No-one talks about it because it isn't relevant. The fact that a 1970s plant didn't get every safety upgrade over the course of 40 years is possible. You dont think plans on how to prevent a disaster caused by a Tsunami 3 years prior to a disaster caused by Tsunami is relevant? Interesting world view.
    - roenxi 6y ago
      I can't quite figure out why you think it is interesting, so I'll post a reply to my top 2 guesses at what you mean: 1) If you think that the disaster should be considered, I don't see why you think my view is interesting. I'm arguing we should just chalk it up to bad safety practices, which does happen from time to time. If we assume one Fukushima every 20-25 years (which seems absurdly pessimistic given that all the new designs are much safer than Fukushima from the get go and it took somethign close to a 1:500 year disaster to breach Fukushima's design) then the cost-benifits are still in nuclear's favour. A nuclear catastrophe is less damaging than business-as-usual for coal. Living next to a coal plant will have detectable negative health impacts in the community due directly to the coal plant. Living next to Fukushima - even up to the meltdown - won't. The economic consequences of owning property in the exclusion zone probably even that up, but I would still want to see the stats before accepting Fukushima is worse. Coal dust is nasty stuff. 2) If you think that the disaster was nearly prevented and should be discounted on that basis; that is a bad argument and you should abandon it. The disaster did happen and that needs to be dealt with.
dv_dt 6y ago
When you dig down to it, they're claimed to be safe because of the difficulty of uniquely nailing down the cause of cancers - so any that are potentially caused are systematically discounted.
viraptor 6y ago
One is the issues in Fukushima is that it did not have a working core catcher which is a feature in new (as in, last few decades) designs. You don't need to be immune - only handle failures which have been predicted for the region and warned about.
- corty 6y ago
  Core catchers do need emergency cooling working. Also, Fukushima had far more basic failures in far simpler safety features being lacking or absent. No pressure-resistant containment to speak of. No hydrogen recombinators. No passive emergency cooling capacity or properly redundant active emergency cooling because of braindead placement of generators. A fish pond on a nearby hill would have helped, together with gravity... Any later western reactor design has those. Look at TMI. Thats what it should have looked like, even without a core catcher. (granted, scenarios are not the same)
Ericson2314 6y ago
> Look at Fukushima for example Yes, and what about it?
visarga 6y ago
> I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Look at Fukushima for example. A 49 year old plant with a 53 years old design. Are you serious, did you follow the SOTA?
mhh__ 6y ago
Nuclear power isn't flawless, but the fossil alternatives can kill people every single day. Fukushima killed somewhere on the order of 10 people? That's a level 7 event on an ancient plant, a wind turbine falling over could easily kill that many people if it landed on a bus. This time it can be different, but your black swan argument isn't much different from our fear of flying.
- orangecat 6y ago
  To be fair, several hundred people died due to the Fukushima evacuations. Which doesn't change the result that nuclear power is extremely safe, even coming in under renewables in deaths per terawatt-hour: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
tekkk 6y ago
Oh jeezs, let's bury our heads in sand and never get out of our houses. How safe is air travel? Taking a car? Fact is, we take calculated risks every day - some smaller, some larger. Unless you build the plant next to an ocean with on-going seismic activity, you should be pretty safe unless an asteroid hits straight to the vicinity of the plant. Counting out the crazy scientists who decide to do experiments in the middle of the night of course. I think we are past that stage. And I'm tired of anti-nuclear arguments pretending that wind, solar and hydro energy will miraculously satisfy all our energy needs in the near future. If we phase out fossil fuels and switch to using electric cars and such, we need a lot more energy. Using uranium, otherwise quite useless mineral, we can produce some portion of that energy (as proven). Especially because it doesn't depend on natural conditions so it produces stable output all year around. I would too prefer having all-green energy sources, but I'm pragmatist and in general not afraid of taking calculated risks in life. Maybe I'm too trusting of my nuclear engineers but then again, I still take planes and ride cars.
- LarvaFX 6y ago
  Well look at the Boeing Max desaster
Lazare 6y ago
> I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Nuclear power is relatively safe. Nothing is 100% safe. Rooftop solar actually has a surprisingly high fatality rate from installers falling off of roofs! Fossil fuels release horrible byproducts into the atmosphere, hydro sometimes causes floods...everything has drawbacks. > Analysis of nuclear power should take into account Black Swan events Quite right. Analysis of all power options should take into account black swan events (eg, a hydro dam failure taking out a city), but they should also do the reverse, and take into account the normal risks of operations. A coal power plant is subject to any particularly terrible catastrophic failure modes, but every day it operates it spews out a lot of carcinogens. Imagine a system that kills 5k people once every 20 years, versus a system that kills 1 person a day. You end up with scary headlines about the first one, but the second one kills significantly more people over time. > pro-nuclear arguments continuously give the tired argument that with new designs “this time is different.” The pro-nuclear arguments I have seen are much more conservative than that. They point out, correctly, that even counting Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, nuclear energy is relatively safe. If the future ends up safer than the past that would be a bonus, but the past has been shockingly safe. Coal kills around 13k people every single year in the US alone. How many people have died due to nuclear power in the US in the entire history of nuclear energy?
- bgorman 6y ago
  How can we know that coal kills 13k people a year in the US? Sure, burning coal releases carcinogens but most of the population lives far away from coal plants.
  - Lazare 6y ago
    This study says 13k: https://www.catf.us/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/CATF_Pub_TheTollFromCoal.pdf https://www.catf.us/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/CATF_Pub_TheT... Estimates vary; some reckon it's more like 50k: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1352231013004548?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...
  - corty 6y ago
pippy 6y ago
Everyone knows about chernobyl. No one knows about pike river. Yet they killed the same amount of people. Every single nuclear incident is propagandized, yet dirty energy gets a free rap. It's a shame as global warming will cause much more damage than the chernobyl exclusion zone which is essentially a nature reserve now.
orangecat 6y ago
Look at Fukushima for example. Yes, do that. And you'll find that the meltdown and evacuations killed fewer people than did shutting down all of Japan's nuclear plants afterward (PDF: http://ftp.iza.org/dp12687.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp12687.pdf). In other words, nuclear power comes out ahead even if you assume there will be a Fukushima-class disaster every 10 years, which is absurdly pessimistic.
- thehappypm 6y ago
  Any time I hear that “Fukushima wasn’t that bad!” it just makes nuclear that much further out of reach.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    I think a lot of people have yet to internalize this fact: Humans aren't Vulcans, and pure rationality does not now, and never will in the future, drive public policy. Humans are emotional beings, and failing to account for and appeal to that will always result in failure.
    - emiliobumachar 6y ago
      That's a great reason to predict nuclear power will not be built, but a terrible reason to e.g. vote against it. We could shut down a technology on a single fatality if we focused hard enough on the victim and their family.
M2Ys4U 6y ago
>I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Look at Fukushima for example. How many people died as a result of the accident? Wikipedia lists only one. There'll probably be a few hundred in the coming decades as a result of cancers caused by radiation. Now compare that to the number of people that have died since then, as a result of burning coal. Two, maybe three orders of magnitude more people.
corty 6y ago
> Look at Fukushima for example. Look at Three Mile Island. That is the kind of accident profile with less shitty reactor designs than Chernobyl and Fukushima you should be looking at. Modern PWRs built today are even safer than TMI in accidents. It is the 50 year old or soviet shitty designs that unfortunately caused the bad reputation of nuclear power. Plants which should have never started operating or should have been shut down a few decades ago, when the next generation (like TMI) came into being.
- fuoqi 6y ago
  These "soviet shitty designs" are also 50-60 years old. So they are as shitty as American PWR/BWR designs used in TMI and Fukushima. Positive void coefficient is certainly a design oversight (same as design errors in the early PWR/BWR reactors), but without intentionally fucking with reactor and with a good control system, it can properly work without issues and 10 operational RBMK reactors demonstrate it in practice.
  - corty 6y ago
    Fukushima were BWRs, and older and far shittier than the PWR in TMI. TMI is how such an accident "should" look like. And of course there are improvements on that in newer generations.
ApolloFortyNine 6y ago
>Look at Fukushima for example. As others have pointed out, this is a 53 year old design. Not exactly the best example for modern nuclear power. New reactor designs implement passive cooling that allows for 0 interaction for 72 hours. 72 hours is more than enough time for manual intervention to be possible. >The design is intended to passively remove heat for 72 hours, after which its gravity drain water tank must be topped up for as long as cooling is required [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000
tlear 6y ago
Maybe it has something to do with fact that Fukushima as of now caused 0 radiation deaths?
cwhiz 6y ago
You’re right. We should continue warming the planet while waiting for the pipe dream that is full renewables. After all, perfect is the worst enemy of good.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
paulintrognon 6y ago
Guess how many people realistically died from Fukushima radiations? Likely zero [1]. People died from the tsunami, and from the irrationnal panic of the evacuation of people from hospital. Read the Wikipedia article and check the sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... [1] https://www.unscear.org/docs/publications/2013/UNSCEAR_2013_Report_Vol.I.pdf https://www.unscear.org/docs/publications/2013/UNSCEAR_2013_...

by tbenst 6y ago

etrautmann 6y ago

Yes, and even when you consider those costs, it pales in comparison to the lives lost and negative externalities of coal, oil, and gas usage. These include climate change, particulate pollution, environmental release of mercury, devastation of vast swaths of the environment worldwide, and other factors that may be hard to quantify but negatively impactful.

matwood 6y ago
There was a post on HN the other day that talked about how hard it is for humans to see beyond direct first order effects. Once you get to indirect or N order effects, it's nearly impossible for humans to fully appreciate. People see nuclear and it's easy to draw a straight line accident -> damage. People know about mercury is seafood, but they can't seem to attach fossil fuel burning to that problem even when told. It's a disconnect that I hope as a species we will one day figure out. Global warming and weather changes? Good luck.
- r00fus 6y ago
  It helped that there was a whole campaign propped up by the fossil fuel companies to demonize nuclear. Don't get me wrong - I think there are issues with nuclear - primarily the waste heat - generally ruins the rivers or other local bodies of water even assuming radioactive waste is contained.
legulere 6y ago
There’s already a disinvestment in fossil fuel going on. You have to compare nuclear with renewables.
- defnotashton2 6y ago
  Your assuming we can run on renewable, which we can't, and won't be able to in our life time. Germany is a good example.
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    I don't see why not. Renewables are already cheaper than nuclear. The only issue is the fact that it is intermittent and we don't have cheap enormous batteries yet. But that can probably be solved by over-provisioning, long distance HVDC power lines, and gas power stations as backup.
  - legulere 6y ago
    How is Germany a good example? Renewables were less than 20% 10 years ago and are now more than 50%. Meanwhile it has one of the most stable electricity network. https://www.energy-charts.de/energy_pie_de.htm?year=2020 https://www.energy-charts.de/energy_pie_de.htm?year=2020
    - p_l 6y ago
      The 50% is for peak renewable usage. To keep grid stability, Germany depends a lot on French nuclear power plants, imports from elsewhere (usually not green), and ridiculously dirty lignite power plants with natural gas for load following. And they are building more and more gas power plants and can't really decrease the amount of dirty coal (lignite fueled power plants make other coal-fired power plants look clean)
      - legulere 6y ago
        Did you actually look at the link that I posted? Those are the numbers for all of 2020. Germany doesn’t depend on French nuclear power. Germany was a net exporter to France in many of the last years. Many neighboring countries have even higher percentage of renewables (Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Norway which is connected via nord.link). Even though I would have shit down fossil fuel power plants before nuclear, Germany still manages to decrease fossil energy use in their energy mix: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei:Energiemix_Deutschland.svg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei:Energi...
tbenst 6y ago
Agreed. The question I meant to raise was nuclear power versus other alternative energy sources, eg wind/solar/hydropower/geothermal. Comparisons of nuclear power to these other sources are typically dishonest in that they do not account for nuclear disasters. This may be an acceptable risk but it needs to at least be included in analysis, say one disaster per 100 operating years (my estimate of this value: 1 in 50-500 years). Globally, there’s only 440 operating nuclear power plants and there’s been ~100 nuclear disasters. In the last 20 years, there have been at least 6 nuclear plant disasters that cause more than $100 million in property damage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
- lucb1e 6y ago
  > The question I meant to raise was nuclear power versus other [renewable sources] (I'll assume this is still about safety, as the comment you're referring to with "meant to raise" started with "I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe".) As far as I have read, nuclear is the safest option barring none. There are so few nuclear accidents that the casualties are a rounding error and the confidence is low. But that is not the only thing we're optimizing for. What we need is to have a lower environmental impact so that later generations shall live long and prosper. Wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear all fit that bill right now. Eventually we'll get rid of fission, perhaps in favor of fusion or perhaps of 100% renewables. Given that we didn't do a large effort in the past few decades on shutting down carbon-based power generation and building 100% renewable green energy without nuclear, and we aren't managing to do it fast enough today, either, we need to make big steps to get there without fighting a billion small battles: one person doesn't like the sight of solar panels on the neighbours' roof (e.g. my dad), another doesn't like a wind turbine in their back yard, hydro power has environmental concerns and doesn't work everywhere... etc. We don't have time for this. Heck, we also don't have the time necessary to build nuclear power plants, but I just don't see any other option than to start now and finally cut down on carbon emissions. If you're not convinced by nuclear, fine: by all means let us build renewable energy sources at the rate warranted to limit the impact of this climate disaster. I'm just not sure we'll be fast enough.

himinlomax 6y ago

> Look at Fukushima for example. It seems hard to imagine a nuclear power plant design, even Gen III or IV that would be immune to any possible natural disaster. For Fukushima, it seems that the panicked response of the local authorities (evacuating the whole area ...) was what caused the most problems.

wazoox 6y ago
Exactly zero people died because of radiation at Fukushima. And keep in mind that if the entire exclusion zone was covered with solar panels, it wouldn't produce nearly as much power annually as the nuclear plant did.
bluquark 6y ago
The magnitude and extent of the radioactive release was largely unknowable in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. The local authorities were put in an impossible position, either gamble with everyone's health or evacuate at great cost. The root cause of the dilemma is that the worst case scenario for traditional nuclear is so severe and nobody can tell decision-makers with high confidence whether or not you've just hit it.
- infogulch 6y ago
  The fundamental, unsolvable difficulty of making decisions with imperfect information seems to be often under analyzed. Are there any related fields that study this decision making difficulty?
  - patrickfreed 6y ago
    professional poker
  - john-shaffer 6y ago
    I highly recommend "Probability Theory" by E.T. Jaynes. Don't be fooled by the generic title - the book is my Bible for reasoning with uncertainty. > In my opinion, this book is a required read for anyone who wishes to understand precisely how the scientific worldview is, in a mathematically defensible sense, the best possible worldview, the one that lets us optimally use evidence to develop an interlocked Bayesian network of evidence supported beliefs that can change and evolve as the evidence is accumulated. It also shows the critical connections between physics and statistical mechanics and Shannon's theorem in computational information theory, laying the foundation for a fair bit of modern physics as it demonstrates that physical entropy and information entropy are very much one and the same thing, from a certain point of view.

wnevets 6y ago

No one likes to talk about it however the Fukushima disaster could have been prevented with current technology but it was cheaper in the short term not to. Even IF you could have a super safe design a huge part of the problem was the lack of maintenance and actually implementing the safety designs they had. [1] Why would anyone trust these companies to actually do what is right at the cost of the bottom line? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#Prior_safety_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

roenxi 6y ago
No-one talks about it because it isn't relevant. The fact that a 1970s plant didn't get every safety upgrade over the course of 40 years is possible. But if you do a cost-benifit analysis of nuclear power and just add Fukushima to the cost column it is still an absurdly good idea to go nuclear. The status quo we currently enjoy is comparable to the worst-case in nuclear. If we applied nuclear safety standards I suspect coal fired power plants would have an exclusion zone too; they cause a lot of pollution and the health impacts around them are detectable.
- wnevets 6y ago
  >No-one talks about it because it isn't relevant. The fact that a 1970s plant didn't get every safety upgrade over the course of 40 years is possible. You dont think plans on how to prevent a disaster caused by a Tsunami 3 years prior to a disaster caused by Tsunami is relevant? Interesting world view.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    I can't quite figure out why you think it is interesting, so I'll post a reply to my top 2 guesses at what you mean: 1) If you think that the disaster should be considered, I don't see why you think my view is interesting. I'm arguing we should just chalk it up to bad safety practices, which does happen from time to time. If we assume one Fukushima every 20-25 years (which seems absurdly pessimistic given that all the new designs are much safer than Fukushima from the get go and it took somethign close to a 1:500 year disaster to breach Fukushima's design) then the cost-benifits are still in nuclear's favour. A nuclear catastrophe is less damaging than business-as-usual for coal. Living next to a coal plant will have detectable negative health impacts in the community due directly to the coal plant. Living next to Fukushima - even up to the meltdown - won't. The economic consequences of owning property in the exclusion zone probably even that up, but I would still want to see the stats before accepting Fukushima is worse. Coal dust is nasty stuff. 2) If you think that the disaster was nearly prevented and should be discounted on that basis; that is a bad argument and you should abandon it. The disaster did happen and that needs to be dealt with.

dv_dt 6y ago

When you dig down to it, they're claimed to be safe because of the difficulty of uniquely nailing down the cause of cancers - so any that are potentially caused are systematically discounted.

viraptor 6y ago

One is the issues in Fukushima is that it did not have a working core catcher which is a feature in new (as in, last few decades) designs. You don't need to be immune - only handle failures which have been predicted for the region and warned about.

corty 6y ago
Core catchers do need emergency cooling working. Also, Fukushima had far more basic failures in far simpler safety features being lacking or absent. No pressure-resistant containment to speak of. No hydrogen recombinators. No passive emergency cooling capacity or properly redundant active emergency cooling because of braindead placement of generators. A fish pond on a nearby hill would have helped, together with gravity... Any later western reactor design has those. Look at TMI. Thats what it should have looked like, even without a core catcher. (granted, scenarios are not the same)

Ericson2314 6y ago

> Look at Fukushima for example Yes, and what about it?

visarga 6y ago

> I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Look at Fukushima for example. A 49 year old plant with a 53 years old design. Are you serious, did you follow the SOTA?

mhh__ 6y ago

Nuclear power isn't flawless, but the fossil alternatives can kill people every single day. Fukushima killed somewhere on the order of 10 people? That's a level 7 event on an ancient plant, a wind turbine falling over could easily kill that many people if it landed on a bus. This time it can be different, but your black swan argument isn't much different from our fear of flying.

orangecat 6y ago
To be fair, several hundred people died due to the Fukushima evacuations. Which doesn't change the result that nuclear power is extremely safe, even coming in under renewables in deaths per terawatt-hour: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

tekkk 6y ago

Oh jeezs, let's bury our heads in sand and never get out of our houses. How safe is air travel? Taking a car? Fact is, we take calculated risks every day - some smaller, some larger. Unless you build the plant next to an ocean with on-going seismic activity, you should be pretty safe unless an asteroid hits straight to the vicinity of the plant. Counting out the crazy scientists who decide to do experiments in the middle of the night of course. I think we are past that stage. And I'm tired of anti-nuclear arguments pretending that wind, solar and hydro energy will miraculously satisfy all our energy needs in the near future. If we phase out fossil fuels and switch to using electric cars and such, we need a lot more energy. Using uranium, otherwise quite useless mineral, we can produce some portion of that energy (as proven). Especially because it doesn't depend on natural conditions so it produces stable output all year around. I would too prefer having all-green energy sources, but I'm pragmatist and in general not afraid of taking calculated risks in life. Maybe I'm too trusting of my nuclear engineers but then again, I still take planes and ride cars.

LarvaFX 6y ago
Well look at the Boeing Max desaster

Lazare 6y ago

> I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Nuclear power is relatively safe. Nothing is 100% safe. Rooftop solar actually has a surprisingly high fatality rate from installers falling off of roofs! Fossil fuels release horrible byproducts into the atmosphere, hydro sometimes causes floods...everything has drawbacks. > Analysis of nuclear power should take into account Black Swan events Quite right. Analysis of all power options should take into account black swan events (eg, a hydro dam failure taking out a city), but they should also do the reverse, and take into account the normal risks of operations. A coal power plant is subject to any particularly terrible catastrophic failure modes, but every day it operates it spews out a lot of carcinogens. Imagine a system that kills 5k people once every 20 years, versus a system that kills 1 person a day. You end up with scary headlines about the first one, but the second one kills significantly more people over time. > pro-nuclear arguments continuously give the tired argument that with new designs “this time is different.” The pro-nuclear arguments I have seen are much more conservative than that. They point out, correctly, that even counting Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, nuclear energy is relatively safe. If the future ends up safer than the past that would be a bonus, but the past has been shockingly safe. Coal kills around 13k people every single year in the US alone. How many people have died due to nuclear power in the US in the entire history of nuclear energy?

bgorman 6y ago
How can we know that coal kills 13k people a year in the US? Sure, burning coal releases carcinogens but most of the population lives far away from coal plants.
- Lazare 6y ago
  This study says 13k: https://www.catf.us/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/CATF_Pub_TheTollFromCoal.pdf https://www.catf.us/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/CATF_Pub_TheT... Estimates vary; some reckon it's more like 50k: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1352231013004548?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...
- corty 6y ago

pippy 6y ago

Everyone knows about chernobyl. No one knows about pike river. Yet they killed the same amount of people. Every single nuclear incident is propagandized, yet dirty energy gets a free rap. It's a shame as global warming will cause much more damage than the chernobyl exclusion zone which is essentially a nature reserve now.

orangecat 6y ago

Look at Fukushima for example. Yes, do that. And you'll find that the meltdown and evacuations killed fewer people than did shutting down all of Japan's nuclear plants afterward (PDF: http://ftp.iza.org/dp12687.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp12687.pdf). In other words, nuclear power comes out ahead even if you assume there will be a Fukushima-class disaster every 10 years, which is absurdly pessimistic.

thehappypm 6y ago
Any time I hear that “Fukushima wasn’t that bad!” it just makes nuclear that much further out of reach.
- Karunamon 6y ago
  I think a lot of people have yet to internalize this fact: Humans aren't Vulcans, and pure rationality does not now, and never will in the future, drive public policy. Humans are emotional beings, and failing to account for and appeal to that will always result in failure.
  - emiliobumachar 6y ago
    That's a great reason to predict nuclear power will not be built, but a terrible reason to e.g. vote against it. We could shut down a technology on a single fatality if we focused hard enough on the victim and their family.

M2Ys4U 6y ago

>I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Look at Fukushima for example. How many people died as a result of the accident? Wikipedia lists only one. There'll probably be a few hundred in the coming decades as a result of cancers caused by radiation. Now compare that to the number of people that have died since then, as a result of burning coal. Two, maybe three orders of magnitude more people.

corty 6y ago

> Look at Fukushima for example. Look at Three Mile Island. That is the kind of accident profile with less shitty reactor designs than Chernobyl and Fukushima you should be looking at. Modern PWRs built today are even safer than TMI in accidents. It is the 50 year old or soviet shitty designs that unfortunately caused the bad reputation of nuclear power. Plants which should have never started operating or should have been shut down a few decades ago, when the next generation (like TMI) came into being.

fuoqi 6y ago
These "soviet shitty designs" are also 50-60 years old. So they are as shitty as American PWR/BWR designs used in TMI and Fukushima. Positive void coefficient is certainly a design oversight (same as design errors in the early PWR/BWR reactors), but without intentionally fucking with reactor and with a good control system, it can properly work without issues and 10 operational RBMK reactors demonstrate it in practice.
- corty 6y ago
  Fukushima were BWRs, and older and far shittier than the PWR in TMI. TMI is how such an accident "should" look like. And of course there are improvements on that in newer generations.

ApolloFortyNine 6y ago

>Look at Fukushima for example. As others have pointed out, this is a 53 year old design. Not exactly the best example for modern nuclear power. New reactor designs implement passive cooling that allows for 0 interaction for 72 hours. 72 hours is more than enough time for manual intervention to be possible. >The design is intended to passively remove heat for 72 hours, after which its gravity drain water tank must be topped up for as long as cooling is required [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000

tlear 6y ago

Maybe it has something to do with fact that Fukushima as of now caused 0 radiation deaths?

cwhiz 6y ago

You’re right. We should continue warming the planet while waiting for the pipe dream that is full renewables. After all, perfect is the worst enemy of good.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

paulintrognon 6y ago

Guess how many people realistically died from Fukushima radiations? Likely zero [1]. People died from the tsunami, and from the irrationnal panic of the evacuation of people from hospital. Read the Wikipedia article and check the sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... [1] https://www.unscear.org/docs/publications/2013/UNSCEAR_2013_Report_Vol.I.pdf https://www.unscear.org/docs/publications/2013/UNSCEAR_2013_...