4 ms·

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. Any

by jdp23 15y 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 15y 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.

by jdp23 15y ago

ChuckMcM 15y 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.