3 ms·

Chernobyl's plant was built in 1972. Fukushima's in 1971. One would hope the technology improved a bit in 40 years...

by lrem 5y ago

mrtksn 5y ago
Of course it did but do you think that people in the 70's were promised anything less than perfect safety? Was the deal something like “now you get electricity and a salary but there’s a chance that you will die or lose everything you worked for your entire life overnight if an experiment goes wrong or earthquake hits”.
- pas 5y ago
  This is a silly argument. The passive safety of recent designs is demonstrated. And even if there was a promise of perfect safety, it doesn't mean anything, because just as we know now people knew back then, that there are risks. That's why there were and there are safety systems. And we can reason about them, we have a lot more data, we have better models, hence better predictions. There are many big dangerous engineering installations and systems around the world. Dams, bridges, high rises, tunnels, mines, cable cars, high speed rail, airplanes, chemical plants, furnaces. Nuclear's risk profile seems scary because of the long tail (high level waste for thousands of years). Which is not something we have expertise with, but again, not something that we can't make at least reasonable predictions about.
  - mrtksn 5y ago
    There are always passive safety systems, Chernobyl and Fukushima had too. The problem with these safety systems is that they are assumed to be built flawlessly, which is not always the case. And "There are other dangerous machinery in the world" is just whatabaoutism. People smoke tobacco, should we bring back asbestos too because of that? The world lost such a great insulator. If you are looking for a silly argument, I suggest enjoy some whataboutism. Anyway, the rectors do have a similar problem with the planes: To make it safe after each incident we are making it more expensive or inconvenient too because we cannot afford having fast developing catastrophic incidents of those. A nutjob crashes a plane into a building and now the boarding takes 2 hours extra and involves a cavity search. IMHO, we should definitely use fusion nuclear energy but it better be a temporary fix until we deploy the renewables. Oh BTW, the prediction about the nuclear waste so far is that it's going to stay with us for the foreseeable future and we don't know what to do with it. The best we can do is to put it in caves together with scary looking signs and drawings and hope for the best for the next thousands of years. That's not even implemented yet as most of the waste sits next to the reactors because when these were built they also had no idea what to do with the waste. Kicking the can down is not a sustainable solution. Just take a look at this: https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/1435949837158060033 https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/1435949837158060033 This is a photo of the new head of Afghanistan Central Bank. If Afghanistan had a nuclear plant, we could have s similar photo from the reactor control room.
    - lrem 5y ago
      > There are always passive safety systems, Chernobyl and Fukushima had too. The problem with these safety systems is that they are assumed to be built flawlessly, which is not always the case. This is plain wrong - nobody ever was stupid enough to assume things to be built flawlessly. In fact, the Chernobyl disaster was caused by a mishandled safety test. > IMHO, we should definitely use fusion nuclear energy but it better be a temporary fix until we deploy the renewables. You mean we should deploy a temporary fix in the 22nd century? ;) (Fusion is unlikely to become practical in the next couple decades, fission is the one that we can do now.) > That's not even implemented yet as most of the waste sits next to the reactors because when these were built they also had no idea what to do with the waste. Kicking the can down is not a sustainable solution. Well, since it can stay in the plants after decades of accumulating waste, without clogging said plants, is it that much of a problem?
      - mrtksn 5y ago
        I meant to type fission somehow typed fusion, my apologies. I'm all in for fusion, the one in the sky is my favourite and I would love to have an artificial one too.
    - opo 5y ago
      >There are always passive safety systems, Chernobyl and Fukushima had too. The Chernobyl plant was such a dangerous enough design that it would have been illegal to build it anywhere except the Soviet Union. There were many screwups at Fukushima but I think there might have been one worker who died from exposure to radiation. As a comparison thousands of people have died from hydroelectric dam failures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st... >...Oh BTW, the prediction about the nuclear waste so far is that it's going to stay with us for the foreseeable future and we don't know what to do with it. In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel: "...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amount of waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum!) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. (To help put it in perspective, do some web searches about the problems with coal waste - it will be a much harder problem to solve than nuclear waste. The problems with coal waste aren't discussed much since people focus on the air pollution from burning coal as it directly kills so many people.)
- lumost 5y ago
  There was an international engineering letter of protest that the Soviet RBNK reactor in Chernobyl was an unsafe design. The reactor was too large to have a containment dome, which as a standard feature of all western reactors would have prevented the accident.

Chernobyl's plant was built in 1972. Fukushima's in 1971. One would hope the technology improved a bit in 40 years...

by lrem 5y ago

Chernobyl's plant was built in 1972. Fukushima's in 1971. One would hope the technology improved a bit in 40 years...

Of course it did but do you think that people in the 70's were promised anything less than perfect safety? Was the deal something like “now you get electricity and a salary but there’s a chance that you will die or lose everything you worked for your entire life overnight if an experiment goes wrong or earthquake hits”.

pas 5y ago
This is a silly argument. The passive safety of recent designs is demonstrated. And even if there was a promise of perfect safety, it doesn't mean anything, because just as we know now people knew back then, that there are risks. That's why there were and there are safety systems. And we can reason about them, we have a lot more data, we have better models, hence better predictions. There are many big dangerous engineering installations and systems around the world. Dams, bridges, high rises, tunnels, mines, cable cars, high speed rail, airplanes, chemical plants, furnaces. Nuclear's risk profile seems scary because of the long tail (high level waste for thousands of years). Which is not something we have expertise with, but again, not something that we can't make at least reasonable predictions about.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  There are always passive safety systems, Chernobyl and Fukushima had too. The problem with these safety systems is that they are assumed to be built flawlessly, which is not always the case. And "There are other dangerous machinery in the world" is just whatabaoutism. People smoke tobacco, should we bring back asbestos too because of that? The world lost such a great insulator. If you are looking for a silly argument, I suggest enjoy some whataboutism. Anyway, the rectors do have a similar problem with the planes: To make it safe after each incident we are making it more expensive or inconvenient too because we cannot afford having fast developing catastrophic incidents of those. A nutjob crashes a plane into a building and now the boarding takes 2 hours extra and involves a cavity search. IMHO, we should definitely use fusion nuclear energy but it better be a temporary fix until we deploy the renewables. Oh BTW, the prediction about the nuclear waste so far is that it's going to stay with us for the foreseeable future and we don't know what to do with it. The best we can do is to put it in caves together with scary looking signs and drawings and hope for the best for the next thousands of years. That's not even implemented yet as most of the waste sits next to the reactors because when these were built they also had no idea what to do with the waste. Kicking the can down is not a sustainable solution. Just take a look at this: https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/1435949837158060033 https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/1435949837158060033 This is a photo of the new head of Afghanistan Central Bank. If Afghanistan had a nuclear plant, we could have s similar photo from the reactor control room.
  - lrem 5y ago
    > There are always passive safety systems, Chernobyl and Fukushima had too. The problem with these safety systems is that they are assumed to be built flawlessly, which is not always the case. This is plain wrong - nobody ever was stupid enough to assume things to be built flawlessly. In fact, the Chernobyl disaster was caused by a mishandled safety test. > IMHO, we should definitely use fusion nuclear energy but it better be a temporary fix until we deploy the renewables. You mean we should deploy a temporary fix in the 22nd century? ;) (Fusion is unlikely to become practical in the next couple decades, fission is the one that we can do now.) > That's not even implemented yet as most of the waste sits next to the reactors because when these were built they also had no idea what to do with the waste. Kicking the can down is not a sustainable solution. Well, since it can stay in the plants after decades of accumulating waste, without clogging said plants, is it that much of a problem?
    - mrtksn 5y ago
      I meant to type fission somehow typed fusion, my apologies. I'm all in for fusion, the one in the sky is my favourite and I would love to have an artificial one too.
  - opo 5y ago
    >There are always passive safety systems, Chernobyl and Fukushima had too. The Chernobyl plant was such a dangerous enough design that it would have been illegal to build it anywhere except the Soviet Union. There were many screwups at Fukushima but I think there might have been one worker who died from exposure to radiation. As a comparison thousands of people have died from hydroelectric dam failures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st... >...Oh BTW, the prediction about the nuclear waste so far is that it's going to stay with us for the foreseeable future and we don't know what to do with it. In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel: "...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amount of waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum!) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. (To help put it in perspective, do some web searches about the problems with coal waste - it will be a much harder problem to solve than nuclear waste. The problems with coal waste aren't discussed much since people focus on the air pollution from burning coal as it directly kills so many people.)
lumost 5y ago
There was an international engineering letter of protest that the Soviet RBNK reactor in Chernobyl was an unsafe design. The reactor was too large to have a containment dome, which as a standard feature of all western reactors would have prevented the accident.