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Some problems that Fukushima had: 1950s vintage design, active cooling system, backup power at sea level in a seismically active area. This kind of failure was
by quasirandom 6y ago
Some problems that Fukushima had: 1950s vintage design, active cooling system, backup power at sea level in a seismically active area. This kind of failure was not just predictable, it was predicted.
People travel to Japan from around the world to learn how to build earthquake resistant structures. Their nuclear engineers are top-notch. It was the bureaucracy that failed, not the talent.
In short, the problems were human not technical. People get complacent and greedy. They use every procedural tool they have to delay upgrades, maintenance, and improvement. I think that is at the core of most nuclear skepticism. Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple decades? Or will they neglect basic maintenance and upgrades?
- garmaine 6y ago> Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple decades? Or will they neglect basic maintenance and upgrades? Objectively, yes. There hasn't been a major nuclear reactor leak in the ~75 years the nuclear industry has existed in the USA. Even Three Mile Island, the worst disaster the US ever saw, was fully contained due to regulator-forced safeguards.
- retrac 6y agoI'm not sure why you're downvoted. After 50+ years of routine operation generating a nontrivial proportion of energy, we can look back at a decent amount of data. And what we see is that nuclear has been remarkably safe. Up here in Canada, coal mine disasters alone have killed far more people. When you start adding in air pollution and other such nasties, it's an enormously vast gulf in lethality. A cynical take. Estimate how many people would have died from air pollution due to a coal power plant generating the same amount of electrical energy as the reactor at Chernobyl that blew up. Estimate how many died from Chernobyl. The reasonable estimates of the high end of the former, and low end of the latter, are overlapping. It's not entirely preposterous to suggest that replacing unscrubbed coal plants with shoddy reactors that simply explode after 20 years of operation could actually save lives in net.
- virtue3 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident We got super super lucky. And there's some debate about how bad the accident was with regards to NRCs monitoring. Frankly, the whole plant was a disaster in the making. There was tons of warning lights and other systems but they were essentially useless because they constantly flashed and for poorly understood reasons. 3mile island is an excellent engineering study of what not to do with monitoring. We got very VERY lucky it was as small as it was.
- sir_bearington 6y agoThere was no luck about it. It was a meltdown, and the pressure vessel was compromised. Secondary containment saved the day. Three Mile Island didn't become a Chernobyl not because of luck, but because the US didn't cheap out and skip building concrete condom over the reactor like the Soviets did.
- Covzire 6y agoEven if Chernobyl would have had a containment vessel, what would have been the best case scenario? I'm not an expert but the blast threw the multi-ton slab of steel and concrete lid into the night sky, surely the containment vessel would have had a giant hole in it, albeit saving some of the radiation from the atmosphere of course but not all of it. One reason I think Three Mile Island wasn't as bad is because nobody in the west was crazy enough to build an RBMK.
- sir_bearington 6y agoThe whole point of the containment building is to contain a pressure vessel failure. American containment buildings are built to withstand impact of a fully loaded passenger airliner. That's why the containment vessels are reinforced concrete more than a meter thick. If Chernobyl had secondary containment, the burning fuel rods would not have been exposed directly to atmosphere. Basically, if you have a fire emitting toxic soot it's a lot better to have this fire happen in a concrete dome versus totally exposed.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoFalse, see my SSFL links elsewhere in the thread. Direct link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348051
- redis_mlc 6y ago> It was the bureaucracy that failed, not the talent. It always is though, isn't it?
- at-fates-hands 6y ago> Their nuclear engineers are top-notch. It was the bureaucracy that failed, not the talent. This. All of the articles I've read about the disaster, all continually scapegoated the engineers as the reason for the failure, allowing the politicians and government to get a free pass. I'm not sure why this was the case considering Japanese engineers are some of the best, but the vilification of them never sat well with me because then it cast a negative cloud over every Japanese engineer unfairly.
- chungus_khan 6y agoTEPCO dropped the ball pretty massively too, although IMO it should be the government's responsibility to assume that power operators are going to and not allow them to.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- chefkoch 6y agoIt's not only that, but also nuclear plants run by for profit organisations, where cutting corners will at some level be appreciated to ensure the bottom line. /edit: it's funny that here many are calling for tougher regulation, while in other post many who are pro nuclear complain about toomuch red Tape and top much security.
- sigstoat 6y ago> run by for profit organisations, where cutting corners will at some level be appreciated to ensure the bottom line as though government bureaucrats and congressmen don't like coming in under budget, future consequences be damned.
- chefkoch 6y agoComming in under budget seems like a rare problem with building nuclear plants. While in operation, i think congressman and bureaucrats don't even know about the real costs.
- WalterBright 6y ago> nuclear plants run by for profit organisations, where cutting corners will at some level be appreciated to ensure the bottom line How does that explain the inept handling of Chernobyl?
- wongarsu 6y agoCutting corners was appreciated to meet arbitrary plans and quotas. The failure mode wasn't that different.
- chefkoch 6y agoFrom what i know about this accident, the profit in this case was not to loose face for the higher ups running the plant.
- nullserver 6y ago
- 0xy 6y agoConsidering NASA recommends that nuclear power be "significantly expanded" despite its drawbacks, I think they are sound enough. The US has a pretty squeaky clean record when it comes to nuclear safety and storage protocols. Also, the current status quo of "look we built all this renewable energy! just ignore all those gas peaking plants propping them up!" has to end. Nuclear is green. Renewables + gas is not renewable, not sustainable and not green.
- bob29 6y ago>The US has a pretty squeaky clean record when it comes to nuclear safety and storage protocols. One single nuclear site is consuming 10% of the DoE's budget, and its still leaking. https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article228456109.html https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article228...
- sigstoat 6y agowhile the comment you're replying to didn't make a distinction, i'll make the distinction that that was a nuclear weapons production facility (run by the federal government). further, some of it was constructed during WWII for the manhattan project. so... not great handling, true. strong evidence about how nuclear power plants will be operated in the future? no.
- opo 6y agoThe NRC does not regulate defense nuclear facilities.
- jdsully 6y agoThe Hanford site is a WWII era nuclear weapons facility and is not at all comparable with nuclear reactors for power generation.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoAllow me to introduce you to the relatively unknown Santa Susanna Field Laboratory meltdown/explosion, due to extensive cover ups over decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment Still not fully cleaned up.
- mathgladiator 6y agoThe challenge is ownership at core, and we don't do well in having organizations not trend toward bureaucracy. As much as people hate bureaucracy, they love the order and predictability they produce. It's probably why nuclear power has a ways to go, and it isn't the tech that needs upgrade; it's the people and the philosophy.
- Krasnol 6y agoYeah, it is always some human who fails but in the case of this tech, the failure becomes a catastrophe. So we either take out the human factor or the technology out of the equation. Right now we can only do that with the tech.
- mpweiher 6y agoNo, even with the biggest failures, nuclear is still vastly more safe than the alternatives. What is catastrophic is the news reporting, particularly in Germany. For example, Fukushima was caused by a Tsunami. Death Toll Tsunami: 15,899 Fukushima: 1 —> OMG FUKUSHIMA!!!! <— If you looked at the press coverage, you would think it was the other way around, that there was this Tsunami but it wasn't a big deal and there was the huge "catastrophe" of Fukushima. And many people do believe, fervently, that this is the case, that it was the other way around. But it wasn't. In fact, in Germany Fukushima is considered a "Super-GAU", with a GAU being the "Größter Anzunehmender Unfall", the largest potential accident. So "GAU" itself is already the superlative, but no, we have to rhetorically top the superlative, make it the superest largerest. And that's for an accident that has caused a single death (a worker recently passed and it is considered likely it was an effect, before the death toll from the accident was zero). The only thing that's a Super-GAU is the hyperbole of the hyperventilating press coverage.
- Krasnol 6y agoHow is it that you consider only the immediate deaths from the event and neither the follow up casualties, the evacuation measures and everything else which hangs on this? Do your really think your opposite is so stupid? And yes, I did look at the press coverage a lot since I was in Tokyo at that time. But I also looked at it later on and no, I did not think it was the other way around however I'm also not that blind to ignore all the other consequences this catastrophe had for the region and the people who lived/live there.
- mpweiher 6y agoBecause I also only considered the immediate deaths from the Tsunami. And actually, the 1 death is a follow-up casualty, it wasn't immediate. So if we really only count immediate deaths, that number is 0. Zero. --> OMG FUKUSHIMA!!! <-- What the long-term death rate is going to be is very unclear. Now to the evacuation. "Many deaths are attributed to the evacuation and subsequent long-term displacement caused by mass evacuation that was not necessary for the most part" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... The same happens to be true for Chernobyl, where the health-effects due to the evacuation far exceed the health-effects due to radiation. Whereas for example the wildlife in both exclusion zones is doing just swimmingly. So: Fear of nuclear is killing more people than nuclear. This is generally true, because the use of nuclear energy has saved over a million people from premature death and will (or would) save millions more: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/nuclear-power-may-have-saved-1-8-million-lives-otherwise-lost-to-fossil-fuels-may-save-up-to-7-million-more/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio... But somewhat surprisingly, it is also true when nuclear goes wrong, when there are accidents. Check out the decennial Chernobyl reports by the WHO, they are absolutely fascinating. Spoiler alert: with each report, so every ten years, they massively reduced their estimate of how many people would die as a result, usually by an order of magnitude. Now that doesn't mean that there should not have been any evacuation, but it in both cases it was both to widespread and way too long.
- sigstoat 6y ago> Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple decades? if US institutions can't manage nuclear power, what else can't they manage?
- ericb 6y agoCapitol security?
- bliteben 6y agoOf course nuclear plants would not be safe if “the president” ordered citizens to attack them.
- AniseAbyss 6y agoThat is an interesting idea. What would happen in a civil war? Would the engineers stay at their post safely shutting down the reactors? Nuclear energy demands a level of civilization that we simply cannot guarantee.
- earthboundkid 6y ago- a global pandemic - a war that lasts longer than 1 month - media legitimacy - global financial system
- philipkglass 6y agoI think that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is world-leading. They identify problems proactively and require operators to phase in safety upgrades even for plants built 50 years ago. I live near an operating nuclear reactor and I prefer it over any form of fossil plant. Power reactors operating in the United States are reliable, safe, and have extremely low life cycle emissions of greenhouse gases. Unfortunately, one of the most common refrains from nuclear boosters is that nuclear power is over-regulated. I don't want American nuclear plants held to the same lax safety/environmental standards as fossil plants. If we used taxes to internalize the costs of pollution from fossil-fired plants, low cost natural gas plants probably wouldn't be pushing reactors into early retirement. But leveling the playing field by slashing nuclear safety/inspection down to the low standard expected of fossil plants is the wrong way to go. I am open to specific proposals for reducing regulations in the nuclear sector if there are regulations that impose additional process overhead, don't actually serve a purpose, and survive only from inertia. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there are some of these. But I've been discussing nuclear power for 20+ years, starting back on Usenet, and specific proposals are much less common than generic "get rid of red tape" bluster.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hanniabu 6y agoSorry but I don't trust any nuclear plant in the US to put safety over profits over the long term, especially after all the illogical deregulation done the last 4 years. There's also already some questions on safety in regards to current plants. They're constantly loosening tolerances and changing the way tests are performed to make otherwise failed tests fall within acceptable limits. Plus the plants are already operating 2x their engineered lifespan. Yeah, no thank you.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gbrown_ 6y agoHow much are loosening regulations a concern for nuclear in the US? Obviously recently general utilities haven't fared well as of late (Texas) or nuclear in the past (e.g. Rocky Flats). But as a foreigner who thinks as far as nuclear power is concerned, the DOE seems to being an OK job as of late. Could you share the specifics of the tests you are referring to?
- WalterBright 6y agoThere was a long list of engineering failures at Fukushima. The idea with airplanes is not "design this component so it cannot fail" but "design the system so it can tolerate component failure". Fukushima had a list of failures it could not tolerate. You mentioned one, the vulnerability of the backup power to the seawall being overtopped. The generators could have been put on a raised platform. There were others: 1. the hydrogen was vented into an enclosed space 2. no way to add water to the cooling system with a gravity fed device 3. critical machinery should not be located in the reactor core building 4. no way to bring in electric power from elsewhere
- nicoburns 6y agoAnd it seems likely that with enough operating plant, there always will be engineering failures. Aeroppanes sometimes fail catastrophically too of course.
- nawgz 6y agoDo they? I can't really recall an instance of catastrophic airplane failure over the last decade outside of 737 MAX certification / regulatory capture issues I also think the amount of airplanes that exist is higher than the amount of nuclear reactors we'd need for it to be a strong power source, and I also suspect that airplanes face slightly more volatile conditions
- nicoburns 6y ago> outside of 737 MAX certification / regulatory capture issues Well there's one example! Why would you discount it?
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoIt's a key example, and is the same failure mode nuclear power has. Nuclear power could be engineered to be at least as safe as (most) commercial flight. But it won't be - and this is absolutely predictable. Because of politics and money. There is no answer to this, except to fix politics and money and make them as safe as commercial flight. That's a whole different scale of problem to fixing climate change. IMO this isn't a utopian fantasy, it's absolutely critical for species survival. But it doesn't look as if we're going to be starting the process any time soon. Exporting the same problems to Mars or upload space or wherever won't solve them either.
- dheera 6y agoAlso from my understanding the earthquake wasn't really much of an issue for most of Japan. It was the tsunami that we don't yet have good protections against. Why do humans of the 21st century love building delicate structures on the shoreline at sea level? Historical civilizations generally avoided building on the coast, very likely for good reasons, both for disaster resistance and for military reasons. Most ancient cities of the world are not located on the oceanside, but rather along inland rivers or smaller bodies of water, or at least within some safe distance of the coast. Recent modern cities seem to love building on the coast -- New York, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Dubai -- all these had relatively little history or at least were nothing more than small towns until the past couple hundred years, and are all terrible places to build a city in terms of tsunami resistance.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoLos Angeles was founded pretty far from the coast, and at a decent elevation, roughly 77m / 253feet. It just expanded in every direction. Santa Monica is protected by cliffs as well. Farther south isn't so lucky.
- piannucci 6y agoWouldn’t the plant have been located where demand and cooling capacity were co-located?
- not2b 6y agoMoving goods by sea is vastly cheaper than by land: for all those cities, being a port is why they are significant economic engines. And power plants need cooling and can use sea water for that purpose.
- cbhl 6y agoAncient cities needed to drink the freshwater from the rivers. Now we have man-made reservoirs and aqueducts to deliver drinking water to the coasts. Japan certainly seems to have cities along its rivers, but it also has a lot of costal cities (presumably because it's a small island nation, unlike, say, European civilizations). For Fukushima in particular, I was under the impression they were using the ocean water to cool the plant itself. (Under non-meltdown conditions, you can transfer heat without contaminating the water itself...)
- colordrops 6y agoAll problems are human and not technical though when it comes to engineering failures.
- sir_bearington 6y ago> Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple decades? Seeing as they have done so for 70 years, yes. I don't just think it, I observe that it has safely managed nuclear power. All of the plants have run safely, save for Three Mile Island. And even in that case, safety measures worked and the secondary containment prevented large scale contamination. I don't think it's infallible. But it's aware of its own fallibility and enforces measures like secondary containment.
- jhayward 6y ago> I observe that it has safely managed nuclear power. This is not a correct statement. You cannot assert, for instance, that the pressure vessel head corrosion issue at Davis-Besse[1] was a 'safely managed' power plant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear_Po...
- sir_bearington 6y agoI'm not sure I follow. The vessel head corrosion was detected, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had the plant shut down. How does a story of a safety issues being detected, and operations ceased accordingly indicate unsafe management? It demonstrates the opposite.
- HPsquared 6y agoIt's down to luck that the corrosion was detected before a serious incident occurred.
- jhayward 6y agoThe vessel head had corroded completely through the 6.63" steel pressure head, and the pressure vessel was relying only on the inner cladding to contain pressure. They were just a transient away, for years, from a steam explosion that would completely disassemble the pressure vessel and core and would place maximal stress on the containment building itself. The issue was only "detected", after being covered up for years by falsified reports, when the engineer doing inspections decided to turn himself in. There is no way this condition can be regarded as safe operation, and if that is what you are arguing there can be no question that it is flat wrong. There are many, many of these kinds of situation where, just by the grace of whatever, we dodged a bullet and didn't have the catastrophe. You can't count those situations as adding to a cherry-picked "safe operation record". There is a huge different between "didn't explode today", and "can't explode ever". We have spent too many days, months, years, in the former, rather than the latter. The so-called safety record is a lie.
- andrewla 6y agoThe reason why I find this logic faulty is that none of the "known defects" were sufficient to shut down the plant. It's not a question of bureaucracy -- rather, the bureaucrats are on the other side. To cover their asses, they issue constant statements of imminent danger, and since those dangers never manifest, nobody believes them anymore. If anyone took the warnings seriously the plant would have been shut down ages ago. And that's the problem with tail disasters -- they happen so infrequently that the system is assumed to be redundant to all of them, so even a "failure" as predicted would be met by a failsafe. That's why I personally have turned against nuclear power. It's too complicated and the risks live out on the tail, and they are large (though not "fat" in the Taleb sense -- they're still bounded geographically).
- tryitnow 6y agoThat's the problem I have with nuclear, it's not the technology, it's that our species is not necessarily well-suited to managing the risks associated with nuclear (with some exceptions, maybe France?).
- petre 6y agoThe French were just a more responsible than the Soviets and don't have to deal with earthquakes and tsunamis as much as the Japanese. The also invested a lot in several nuclear designs, comitted to nuclear power and are therefore quite experienced.
- chefkoch 6y agoI can't find any specifics about the partial melt down in 1980 at Saint-Laurent, but it seems a serious accident could bankrupt france in an instand. https://www.businessinsider.com/potential-cost-of-a-nuclear-accident-so-high-its-a-secret-2013-3?r=DE&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/potential-cost-of-a-nuclear-...
- merb 6y agonot so sure about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Accide... france often hides minor stuff, which often results in these more severe events. well france also has only 3 reactors as far as I know that were built in the 2000s. btw. it's also my take. as long as they are operated to turn a profit or in a way that somebody might gain something, it will be basically impossible to have "safe" nuclear power. humans are dangerous.
- titzer 6y agoIt's worth pointing out that essentially the entire US navy is powered by nuclear reactors that service lives in the 3+ decade range, and it's worked astonishingly well. It's not completely without incident, but wow, yeah, civilian nuclear power could really work if held to military standards of engineering and maintenance.
- petre 6y agoNaval reactors are different, their scale is two orders of magnitude lower. One could make other safety guarantees at that scale. They also use enriched uranium which means no refuelling is needed during the service life of the reactor. SMRs can also make some of these safety guarantees.
- titzer 6y agoThey do refuel naval reactors [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refueling_and_overhaul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refueling_and_overhaul]. Given the (relatively) small size of these reactors, why can't they put 100 of them on site at a NPS?
- petre 6y ago> Given the (relatively) small size of these reactors, why can't they put 100 of them on site at a NPS? That's what companies developing SMRs aim to do. For instance NuScale has a design using up to 12 modules of 77 MWe each in a separate stainless steel lined concrete pools of water. The modules are quite innovative and incorporates passive safety features such as natural circulation, redundant passive decay heat removal, gravity driven safety systems. https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/safety-features https://www.nuscalepower.com/benefits/safety-features
- fallingknife 6y agoIt's worth pointing out that US civilian nuclear power plants with service lives in the 3+ decade range have worked astonishingly well. It's not completely without incident, but wow, yeah, military nuclear power could really work if held to the same standards of engineering and maintenance.
- smartmic 6y ago> In short, the problems were human not technical. I disagree. Problems have been in both human and technical realm and, even worse, there is no way to clearly disentangle those two factors. Good arguments are given in Charles Perrow classic work "Normal Accidents" [1]. It is worth citing the tree main conditions which will result in an accident probability of greater than acceptable 1.The system is complex 2.The system is tightly coupled 3.The system has catastrophic potential [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents
- 7952 6y agoI agree with the point about technical vs people. On HN people are more familiar with how the applies to software. It may be technically possible to write bug free safety critical code in C. But in the real world we are all human and make mistakes and we don't have any choice about that. The existence of a hypothetical perfect solution is not a good defense.
- cameldrv 6y agoThere is also a human element. Unit 1 had been retrofitted with an Isolation Condenser, which is capable of cooling the core and preventing a meltdown without needing the pumps that couldn't run due to lack of power. This is exactly the type of upgrade people often suggest. Unfortunately, for reasons that are still murky, this system wasn't activated, and Unit 1 melted down. The problems at Unit 1 also contributed to the problems at other units, causing radiation hazards, diverting personnel and attention, etc. In fact, a larger version of this system is touted as one of the major safety features of the newer AP1000 plants, because all it requires is that you open a couple of valves, and the reactor can be safely shutdown as long as you add water every couple of days. Unfortunately at Fukushima, they didn't open the valves. All of that said, the absolute damage from the accidents at Fukushima was tiny in comparison to the other damage from the tsunami, and much less than the damage of operating coal plants with no accidents whatsoever in Japan.
- godelski 6y agoWhile there are a lot of human faults in this disaster (I think it is hard to deny that generators in the basement were a bad idea) it is also a complicated problem. One factor that isn't frequently brought up is that the Tōhoku earthquake was the 4th largest ever recorded and the largest in Japan (9.1) (second largest recorded was an 8.5 in 1896 and the second largest theorized was an 8.9 in the year 869. Remember this is not linear growth). Fukushima wouldn't have happened with an 8.5. A big reason this is important is because it really sets this event apart from that of Chernobyl, which I'd argue was much more dependent upon human error and bureaucracy. But that means that the problem was both human and technical. What was considered good enough regulation was the issue because it is hard to predict earthquakes and even harder to estimate for earthquakes we've never seen before. No one thought a 9.1 magnitude earthquake would hit Japan and Nuclear safety is typically magnitudes of safety above what is needed (see radiation dosages) and this is a good thing (even though many that are pro nuclear, but never worked in the industry, claim that we're too strict). But you are right that there is infighting between the scientists/engineers and the bureaucrats. But that's been true for every industry I've been a part of. I'm just trying to say that the story of why Fukushima happened is substantially more complicated than I see in the general discussions here on HN, Reddit, or elsewhere.
- RealityVoid 6y agoI just think that people need to out things into perspective. The tsunami that cause Fukushima was dar more damaging than the nuclear event, but people seem to only remember the nuclear event. I think in our mind we make these events far far more serious than they were. Not that they were not serious but every thing in life is a tradeoff and you need to look what you are trading and what you are getting.
- merb 6y ago> The tsunami that cause Fukushima was dar more damaging than the nuclear event, but people seem to only remember the nuclear event. because we still live with the nuclear accident, while the tsunami damages are mostly repaired? Do you want to swim in the water in front of the plant? I probably wouldn't.
- NoOneNew 6y agoI can't find the article for the life of me. From what I can remember, it was soon after the disaster, something came out about another plant that was "hit" by high waters as well. The difference was, their seawall was stupid high. One of the civic engineers during development fought tooth and nail to build the excessively high wall compared to what the gov building code was. If I remember correctly, it ended up being only a two or so meters taller than the tsunami that hit them. The engineer had a really baller statement in the article about how bureaucrats are useless and shouldn't have an opinion when it comes to life safety. I wish I could find it.
- samizdis 6y agoThis one, maybe? https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2012/08/how_tenacity_a_wall_saved_a_ja.html https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2012/08/how_tenacity_a_wa...
- NoOneNew 6y agoHow the hell did you find it so quick? I'm surprised I remembered it relatively well. Though, 1 meter buffer between the tsunami and seawall and the politician quote is better in his words: >"Matsunaga-san hated bureaucrats," Oshima said. "He said they are like human trash. In your country, too, there are probably bureaucrats or officials who never take final responsibility.
- samizdis 6y agoDivination via DuckDuckGo :-) From words in your comment, I used this search string: japan nuclear plant saved engineer battle high sea wall The result was third in the returned list. (Settings - safe search off, global region selected.) Edit to amend: words and concepts in your comment. Also, I'm chuffed to have been able to be of use.
- NoOneNew 6y agoYou... you're beautiful. Thank you. You may have just made me a convert to DDG.
- fallingknife 6y agoAnd yet only 1 person was killed when it melted down. But somehow, it gets more attention than the 10's of thousands that were killed in the tsunami.
- Spooky23 6y ago> People get complacent and greedy. They use every procedural tool they have to delay upgrades, maintenance, and improvement. That is the core argument for a meaningful regulatory regime. Large-scale base load generators only work from a business sense with predictable, steady demand. The price of that guaranteed demand is a near-fixed, managed return on assets and tight regulatory oversight.
- opo 6y ago>...Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple decades? All indications are that much was learned by industry and the NRC after TMI: "...The NRC said the TMI accident also led to increased identification, analysis and publication of plant performance information, and recognising human performance as “a critical component of plant safety”. Key indicators of plant safety performance in the US have improved dramatically. Those indicators show: • The average number of significant reactor events over the past 20 years has dropped to nearly zero. • Today there are far fewer, much less frequent and lower risk events that could lead to a reactor-core damage. • The average number of times safety systems have had to be activated is about one-tenth of what it was 22 years ago. • Radiation exposure levels to plant workers have steadily decreased to about one-sixth of the 1985 exposure levels and are well below national limits. • The average number of unplanned reactor shutdowns has decreased by nearly ten-fold. In 2007 there were about 52 shutdowns compared to about 530 shutdowns in 1985." https://www.nucnet.org/news/three-mile-island-led-to-sweeping-and-permanent-changes https://www.nucnet.org/news/three-mile-island-led-to-sweepin... No one ever promised that there would never be a nuclear accident - that would be unrealistic for any power source. But historically nuclear power has been much safer than all the alternatives that have been available. If only other power sources were as safe: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener... https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/?sh=54873a23709b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d... Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so many people have an understandable misperception that it is more dangerous than other sources of power. 200 thousand people had to be evacuated in CA a couple of years ago because of a lack of maintenance on a hydroelectric dam could have let to catastrophic failure. We got lucky that time as the rains stopped just in time, but how much did the media cover that story? How much would the media have covered that if 200 thousand had been evacuated because of a nuclear power plant? A recent Harvard study shows that pollution from fossil fuels is much worse than previously thought and they estimate that it is responsible for more than 8 million people yearly. We need to move away from burning fossil fuels and we need to use all the tools that are available. https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2021/02/deaths-fossil-fuel-emissions-higher-previously-thought https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2021/02/deaths-fossil-fuel... It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. In that case - great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Texas has shown us what happens with even a small disruption of energy. If it came down to a situation where you were forced to choose, would you prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?
- ncmncm 6y ago> the problems were human not technical.. The logical conclusion is that if we are to continue building nuke plants, we need to keep humans out of picture. We have no technology to ensure that huge institutions handling existentially hazardous technology do not become corrupt and irresponsible. The solution we know of is to avoid handing over such technology to the control of readily corruptible institutions. Corruption is arguably the chief purpose of almost any past nuclear power initiative. A public works project that involves tens of billions of dollars almost inevitably devolves into a nest of corruption, whether it's a nuke plant, a new urban tunnel (cf. Big Dig, NY 2nd Ave), or US military procurement. There is a reason why small and portable nuke generation has not been able to compete: there is little scope for corruption in small nukes. Wind and solar power are not subject to such systemic failures, and are also quite a lot cheaper than nukes, and getting cheaper every year. To prevent failures, we just need to shut down the nuke plants and replace them with solar and wind power. The only remaining question around renewables concerns storage of peak power output for dead times. But power storage is low-tech, thus low-risk, with numerous alternatives--gravity, pressurized-air, chemical--vying simply for the title of cheapest.
- theropost 6y agoBureaucracy destroys - regulation is useful, if applied effectively, however the ever growing bureaucracy, and laziness of average people tends to happen without constant pressure or growth. Working as a programmer in Government has made me realize this.
- lambda_obrien 6y agoThe US Navy does a really safe nuclear power program, but it costs a lot. If you could combine the organizational fortitude of the Nuclear Navy to manage the plants and the maintenance with a reasonable cost, I think that would be sufficient to ensure safety, as long as the designs are also done well. Personally, I think nuclear power is too risky for commercial use, i would put my money in HVDC links, pumped hydro storage, geothermal, and overbuilding renewables as the best path to reducing emissions, and continue to use natural gas for emergency generators for hospitals and stuff.
- dfgdghdf 6y agoThis is arguably worse than an engineering failure though... In an engineering failure we can identify a concrete reason for the failure and integrate that into our engineering knowledge. On the other hand, we will never be able to eliminate the human / bureaucratic element.