6 ms·

You should have read what those pseudo-reactor-experts wrote, maybe then you'd unserstand what they were trying to say.

marshray 16y ago
I read it. By and large it was "don't worry, this won't be another Chernobyl because the control rods went in and shut down the reaction and the cores don't contain flammable graphite". So, yeah, it wasn't Chernobyl, it wasn't TMI, it was its own Fukushima Daiichi style of meltdown disaster better in some ways and worse in others. But the many experts and analysts who went on record early saying this wasn't going to be a major disaster and that it was a "victory for nuclear engineering" were flatly proven wrong and it reveals the blind pro-nuclear bias in their thinking.
- pyre 16y ago
  On the other side, there are the people that hear the word 'nuclear' and think that there is an atom bomb in the middle of the plant with wires coming out of it, ready to explode if someone looks at it funny.
  - smithian 16y ago
    So what? Sloppy thinking on the other side doesn't excuse sloppy thinking on yours. Nuclear advocates should be talking about how nuclear can move forward in the light of the dangers that are more obvious than ever now, not playing a game of "yeah but you're dumb too" with the anti-nuke crowd.
    - pyre 16y ago
      My point was that sloppy thinking about the pro-nuclear crowd doesn't automatically make the anti-nuclear crowd correct (or 'right') because there is plenty of sloppy thinking to go around on the issue.
- jdp23 16y ago
  Agreed. It's striking how many intelligent, rationally-identified people can't see their shared blind spot even when the evidence is captured on the page. Anybody who was involved in the discussions would do well to go back and reread what you said and when you said it, and think about how it looks based on where we are now.
  - ChuckMcM 16y ago
    Can you say more about this? I went back and read what I wrote (not sure if I meet your criteria but I consider myself rational) and don't see the 'blind spot' you mention. (which I suppose would make sense given the definition so help me out here :-) In this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2339304 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2339304 I said "No matter what happens at Fukushima Daiichi, even if all four of the reactors and their spent fuel rods turn into slag candles fused into the foundation of the plant, a rational person would say 'Gee it really is great that we don't have magnitude 9.0 earthquakes with accompanying tsunamis every year, if we did, and they can do this to a nuclear plant, it would be foolish to take those risks.'" That was my comment about the difficulty in having rational discussions on emotional topics. In this comment : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2328783 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2328783 I noted "I dislike the medidiots who conflated a hydrogen explosion with a nuclear explosion. There is however one risk here that neither folks in the media, nor have I seen yet on HN, and that is the danger of old fuel meltdowns." And in this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2324764 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2324764 On the very controversial (in terms of coverage) blog posting about not being worried about the accident: "2) Its important to understand that since the reactor is shut down, its only source of heat is the decay products from when it was running, minus the heat they pulled off while running on battery power. Further the engineering design target (one assumes they test to that target) is that if you integrate over all the heat you generate from all the byproducts from a reactor that was running at 'full' and now has all of its control rods inserted, is less than the heat you would need to add to melt the containment vessel (the flask) You won't be able to restart it but you won't have the core melt through the vessel either." Which seems to have been the case. (comments about holes in the vessel that are plugged by graphite and can leak small amounts of fuel out the bottom of the reactor came later, but the original design continues to keep nearly all the fuel in the reactor's flask.) And perhaps my most polyannaish post in this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2324328 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2324328 "And as others have pointed out, if you get a "full meltdown" with the control rods fully inserted, the resulting uranium/boron alloy is not critical. In short hand, once the rods are in, its game over, just a question of how hard the final result is to clean up. If you keep it under the melting point of the core you can just pull the fuel and dispose of it in the normal way, if not you have to clean out the non-critical slag core." Seems to be where we'll end up. removing the remains of the fuel rods from the bottom of the reactor where they ended up after the fuel pins lost their integrity. I'll reiterate, bad accident, not a 'huge disaster.' Could it get worse? I can imagine scenarios where it could. The waste fuel pond structure could crack and all the water could drain out of those ponds, that would lead to a lot of gamma rays for anyone line of sight to the rods and a possible criticality event if enough neutrons were generated. Will it get worse? At this point it seems the events that would be required are improbable at best. An asteroid or sufficiently large space rock hitting the plant would be sufficient, another 9.0 earthquake disrupting power again, a pipe rupture in the existing cooling recirculation system which sent coolant water outside the building.
- Confusion 16y ago
  They said that based on the information that was available at the time, which was reasonably comforting, given the circumstances. Those that said that it was a major disaster were speculating wildly, mostly based on unofficial (and mostly wrong, even in hindsight) information. That they were right in hindsight doesn't change that.
  - marshray 16y ago
    Five GE MK I reactors lost all forms of cooling for a period of many hours to days. Some had fresh fuel and were operating right up until the time they lost power. They began emitting high levels of radiation and the outer buildings were exploding. Cesium and Iodine were detected externally. Most of this basic information was very well established and confirmed by multiple sources. Those of us who knew this was a huge disaster unfolding were not "right by accident".
    - ChuckMcM 16y ago
      You wrote: "Five GE MK I reactors lost all forms of cooling for a period of many hours to days." And you missed the second part "After experiencing a 9.0 earthquake, which scrammed the reactors, and then a 47' tsunami which destroyed the cooling systems." And you missed the third part "Nobody was killed." Everytime we have a 9.0 earthquake and a 40' foot Tsunami I expect to have deal with a lot of damage and loss of life and general scrambling around because so many things are put under strain at the same time. You could look at this and say "How often do we have 9.0 earthquakes?" and you could see that over the last 112 years we've had six. You might ask about how many of those occurred where we might build a nuclear plant (2) and how many were accompanied by a tsunami on the same coast (1). And you might conclude that this is a pretty rare occurence, probability suggests that it is one you, your children (if you have any), and their children (if they have any) will never see again. You also said "Most of this basic information was very well established and confirmed by multiple sources. Those of us who knew this was a huge disaster unfolding were not 'right by accident'." The place where I and perhaps other disagree with you is when you use the phrase 'huge disaster' here. I've not checked all the comments but most people said early on that this was no doubt the worst possible accident these plants could experience, there were folks who expressed confidence in the layers of systems which are designed to keep such accidents from becoming 'disasters.' What wasn't clearly articulated I guess was the definition of disaster. There are many square kilometers around Chernobyl which were rendered uninhabitable from that accident. In Fukushima's case nowhere will be rendered un-inhabitable. While there are people evacuated currently, those evacuations are temporary. In all likelyhood no one will have died or suffered permanent injury from the Fukushima accident (again due to a variety of safety systems). That wasn't the case in Chernobyl. So an accident which doesn't harm human life, doesn't damage any property not belonging to the power company, and doesn't do any lasting or even long lived damage to the environment, does not rise to the level of 'huge disaster' in my opinion. And looking back at some of those comments they acknowledge that the lack of data from the plants directly left only speculation as an option and they covered the scenario that TEPCO seems to have observed after regaining access to reactor #1's control room. That the engineering of the plants defensive systems, in the absence of the cooling system, the backup system, and the backup backup system, contained the accident's results to the pressure vessel and the containment structure. Water used in the response has collected in the concrete basements under the reactors. The longer lived radioactive by products of the fission process have (as far as anyone can tell) remained contained within the structures designed to contain them. The reactors themselves are a total loss and can probably not be economically be recovered so will no doubt be dismantled. It is the worst possible accident you could have at the plant. As with a luxury car's crumple zones and air bags and other safety gear, the plants systems designed to contain and mitigate the accident have done their jobs. Protecting lives and property. From the moment the wave washed over the plant everyone knew it was a serious accident, the only question has ever been what were the long term ramifications of that accident. My guess is that the plan will involve dismantling reactor #4, using the building and space as a processing center to process recovered material from reactors 1, 2, and 3 separating out the long lived waste from the low energy / short lived waste. The low level waste will become non-waste on its own by alpha/beta decay and the remains of the fuel will be stored with other high level waste that the plants generate. [1] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0763403.html http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0763403.html
- orangecat 16y ago
  But the many experts and analysts who went on record early saying this wasn't going to be a major disaster It's only a "major disaster" by nuclear standards. Compared to the loss of life that we routinely accept in coal mining and the air pollution from burning it, it's barely a blip. (http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/coal-pollution-fatalities http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/coal-p...)
- acqq 16y ago
  Whereas "alarmists" were right: March 27, 2011: "This all fits in well with my discussion Criticality Accident? Unfortunately." http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2011/03/worst-case-scenario.html http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2011/03/worst-case-scena...

I read it. By and large it was "don't worry, this won't be another Chernobyl because the control rods went in and shut down the reaction and the cores don't contain flammable graphite". So, yeah, it wasn't Chernobyl, it wasn't TMI, it was its own Fukushima Daiichi style of meltdown disaster better in some ways and worse in others. But the many experts and analysts who went on record early saying this wasn't going to be a major disaster and that it was a "victory for nuclear engineering" were flatly proven wrong and it reveals the blind pro-nuclear bias in their thinking.

pyre 16y ago
On the other side, there are the people that hear the word 'nuclear' and think that there is an atom bomb in the middle of the plant with wires coming out of it, ready to explode if someone looks at it funny.
- smithian 16y ago
  So what? Sloppy thinking on the other side doesn't excuse sloppy thinking on yours. Nuclear advocates should be talking about how nuclear can move forward in the light of the dangers that are more obvious than ever now, not playing a game of "yeah but you're dumb too" with the anti-nuke crowd.
  - pyre 16y ago
    My point was that sloppy thinking about the pro-nuclear crowd doesn't automatically make the anti-nuclear crowd correct (or 'right') because there is plenty of sloppy thinking to go around on the issue.
jdp23 16y ago
Agreed. It's striking how many intelligent, rationally-identified people can't see their shared blind spot even when the evidence is captured on the page. Anybody who was involved in the discussions would do well to go back and reread what you said and when you said it, and think about how it looks based on where we are now.
- ChuckMcM 16y ago
  Can you say more about this? I went back and read what I wrote (not sure if I meet your criteria but I consider myself rational) and don't see the 'blind spot' you mention. (which I suppose would make sense given the definition so help me out here :-) In this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2339304 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2339304 I said "No matter what happens at Fukushima Daiichi, even if all four of the reactors and their spent fuel rods turn into slag candles fused into the foundation of the plant, a rational person would say 'Gee it really is great that we don't have magnitude 9.0 earthquakes with accompanying tsunamis every year, if we did, and they can do this to a nuclear plant, it would be foolish to take those risks.'" That was my comment about the difficulty in having rational discussions on emotional topics. In this comment : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2328783 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2328783 I noted "I dislike the medidiots who conflated a hydrogen explosion with a nuclear explosion. There is however one risk here that neither folks in the media, nor have I seen yet on HN, and that is the danger of old fuel meltdowns." And in this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2324764 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2324764 On the very controversial (in terms of coverage) blog posting about not being worried about the accident: "2) Its important to understand that since the reactor is shut down, its only source of heat is the decay products from when it was running, minus the heat they pulled off while running on battery power. Further the engineering design target (one assumes they test to that target) is that if you integrate over all the heat you generate from all the byproducts from a reactor that was running at 'full' and now has all of its control rods inserted, is less than the heat you would need to add to melt the containment vessel (the flask) You won't be able to restart it but you won't have the core melt through the vessel either." Which seems to have been the case. (comments about holes in the vessel that are plugged by graphite and can leak small amounts of fuel out the bottom of the reactor came later, but the original design continues to keep nearly all the fuel in the reactor's flask.) And perhaps my most polyannaish post in this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2324328 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2324328 "And as others have pointed out, if you get a "full meltdown" with the control rods fully inserted, the resulting uranium/boron alloy is not critical. In short hand, once the rods are in, its game over, just a question of how hard the final result is to clean up. If you keep it under the melting point of the core you can just pull the fuel and dispose of it in the normal way, if not you have to clean out the non-critical slag core." Seems to be where we'll end up. removing the remains of the fuel rods from the bottom of the reactor where they ended up after the fuel pins lost their integrity. I'll reiterate, bad accident, not a 'huge disaster.' Could it get worse? I can imagine scenarios where it could. The waste fuel pond structure could crack and all the water could drain out of those ponds, that would lead to a lot of gamma rays for anyone line of sight to the rods and a possible criticality event if enough neutrons were generated. Will it get worse? At this point it seems the events that would be required are improbable at best. An asteroid or sufficiently large space rock hitting the plant would be sufficient, another 9.0 earthquake disrupting power again, a pipe rupture in the existing cooling recirculation system which sent coolant water outside the building.
Confusion 16y ago
They said that based on the information that was available at the time, which was reasonably comforting, given the circumstances. Those that said that it was a major disaster were speculating wildly, mostly based on unofficial (and mostly wrong, even in hindsight) information. That they were right in hindsight doesn't change that.
- marshray 16y ago
  Five GE MK I reactors lost all forms of cooling for a period of many hours to days. Some had fresh fuel and were operating right up until the time they lost power. They began emitting high levels of radiation and the outer buildings were exploding. Cesium and Iodine were detected externally. Most of this basic information was very well established and confirmed by multiple sources. Those of us who knew this was a huge disaster unfolding were not "right by accident".
  - ChuckMcM 16y ago
    You wrote: "Five GE MK I reactors lost all forms of cooling for a period of many hours to days." And you missed the second part "After experiencing a 9.0 earthquake, which scrammed the reactors, and then a 47' tsunami which destroyed the cooling systems." And you missed the third part "Nobody was killed." Everytime we have a 9.0 earthquake and a 40' foot Tsunami I expect to have deal with a lot of damage and loss of life and general scrambling around because so many things are put under strain at the same time. You could look at this and say "How often do we have 9.0 earthquakes?" and you could see that over the last 112 years we've had six. You might ask about how many of those occurred where we might build a nuclear plant (2) and how many were accompanied by a tsunami on the same coast (1). And you might conclude that this is a pretty rare occurence, probability suggests that it is one you, your children (if you have any), and their children (if they have any) will never see again. You also said "Most of this basic information was very well established and confirmed by multiple sources. Those of us who knew this was a huge disaster unfolding were not 'right by accident'." The place where I and perhaps other disagree with you is when you use the phrase 'huge disaster' here. I've not checked all the comments but most people said early on that this was no doubt the worst possible accident these plants could experience, there were folks who expressed confidence in the layers of systems which are designed to keep such accidents from becoming 'disasters.' What wasn't clearly articulated I guess was the definition of disaster. There are many square kilometers around Chernobyl which were rendered uninhabitable from that accident. In Fukushima's case nowhere will be rendered un-inhabitable. While there are people evacuated currently, those evacuations are temporary. In all likelyhood no one will have died or suffered permanent injury from the Fukushima accident (again due to a variety of safety systems). That wasn't the case in Chernobyl. So an accident which doesn't harm human life, doesn't damage any property not belonging to the power company, and doesn't do any lasting or even long lived damage to the environment, does not rise to the level of 'huge disaster' in my opinion. And looking back at some of those comments they acknowledge that the lack of data from the plants directly left only speculation as an option and they covered the scenario that TEPCO seems to have observed after regaining access to reactor #1's control room. That the engineering of the plants defensive systems, in the absence of the cooling system, the backup system, and the backup backup system, contained the accident's results to the pressure vessel and the containment structure. Water used in the response has collected in the concrete basements under the reactors. The longer lived radioactive by products of the fission process have (as far as anyone can tell) remained contained within the structures designed to contain them. The reactors themselves are a total loss and can probably not be economically be recovered so will no doubt be dismantled. It is the worst possible accident you could have at the plant. As with a luxury car's crumple zones and air bags and other safety gear, the plants systems designed to contain and mitigate the accident have done their jobs. Protecting lives and property. From the moment the wave washed over the plant everyone knew it was a serious accident, the only question has ever been what were the long term ramifications of that accident. My guess is that the plan will involve dismantling reactor #4, using the building and space as a processing center to process recovered material from reactors 1, 2, and 3 separating out the long lived waste from the low energy / short lived waste. The low level waste will become non-waste on its own by alpha/beta decay and the remains of the fuel will be stored with other high level waste that the plants generate. [1] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0763403.html http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0763403.html
orangecat 16y ago
But the many experts and analysts who went on record early saying this wasn't going to be a major disaster It's only a "major disaster" by nuclear standards. Compared to the loss of life that we routinely accept in coal mining and the air pollution from burning it, it's barely a blip. (http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/coal-pollution-fatalities http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/coal-p...)
acqq 16y ago
Whereas "alarmists" were right: March 27, 2011: "This all fits in well with my discussion Criticality Accident? Unfortunately." http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2011/03/worst-case-scenario.html http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2011/03/worst-case-scena...