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Nuclear science came into industrial scale in America and there has never been a fucked-up American accident. The accidents there have been have been minuscule

Nuclear science came into industrial scale in America and there has never been a fucked-up American accident. The accidents there have been have been minuscule and nobody should lose their shit over them. The ought to be understood as valuable part of the learning process of exactly how much safety must be made part of the design. Binary searching how much safety is truly best involves small accidents. Safety is expensive! Safety takes effort every instant! Safety costs must be balanced against other considerations, but the biggest and most important is profit. There has to be a profit, it can be for the taxpayer, or the energy consumer, or the government, or the investors--hopefully some for all. Profit is essential, you have to reap two seeds from planting one.

horsawlarway 5y ago
> there has never been a fucked-up American accident. What are you smoking? This is blatantly false. We've absolutely had meltdowns, and come very damn close to real disaster (as in - evacuating a 20 mile radius including some 600,000 people close)
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  > and come very damn close to real disaster That's what I'm smoking. For there to be a fucked-up American accident the accident has to actually happen.
monetus 5y ago
Hanford (in Washington) always sticks in my mind as the most fucked up. Oak ridge has had problems, three mile island too of course, but the reactions were commensurately paranoid. Hanford seems to be incapable of not occasionally poisoning people.
- foobar2021 5y ago
  For context, the Hanford reactor was built during ww2; around the same age as the presidential candidates from the 2020 USA election.
- philipkglass 5y ago
  Hanford is definitely the worst, but that's because of its origins as the world's first plutonium production site (first reactor criticality in 1944). Unlike commercial reactors it had to chemically reprocess irradiated fuel because the whole point was extracting plutonium. They were running experiments at industrial scale as they sought better methods for plutonium (and later, uranium-233) extraction. It ran under extreme secrecy in its earlier years, meaning that even by the generally lax standards of pre-EPA chemical facilities it had little environmental/safety oversight. Hanford only ever had one reactor that produced electricity, the N reactor, and that wasn't built until 1963: https://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/NReactor https://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/NReactor
  - daniel-cussen 5y ago
    Of course there's a worst one, there has to be. Well Hanford didn't principally produce energy, so much as just plutonium, so really its mission was weapon production. So now we're changing the subject a bit, no longer is it about electricity, but defense. So we can address that immediately: without the Hanford site, Japan would not have surrendered without an invasion of the home islands. Maybe not even then. It was the "new and cruel bomb," as the Emperor of Japan described it while citing it as the reason for surrender in his speech. That "new and cruel" bomb meant an alternative to reenacting the Battle of Iwo Jima (which I would describe as "fucked up" for both sides without question) a thousand times. Battles to the last cartridge. Forgetting completely about the lives of Allied and Axis soldiers, you realize the death toll that would have on the civilians of Japan? They were on the hook for all kinds of atrocities all over Asia and the Pacific, in the context of total war they pissed off the rest of the world way too hard for the Allies to declare a truce. Just in Korea alone, the stories are just...let's not talk about that, let's stick to what is fucked up within nuclear science. Japanese were subscribed to the idea that their genocide was preferable to surrender. So that's why the bomb, and by extension the Hanford site, were so important. In practice the nukes in Japan explosives second, fireworks first. Napalm was a much better explosive for the money, in terms of the destruction it could produce. The really bad bombings in WWII were in Tokyo and Dresden, a hundred thousand dead per bombing, a new climactic event called a "Firestorm," terrible burns, pavement getting goopy, high winds--I claim those bombings were worse. But they weren't as flamboyant as a star.
freeflight 5y ago
> there has never been a fucked-up American accident That really depends on your definition of "fucked-up", but there is a long list of nuclear accidents in the US [0], among the more "fucked-up" ones were attempts to dispose of nearly a ton of left-over fissile material in mere landfills [1] and then ultimately losing track of them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_t... [1] https://thebulletin.org/2014/05/thorium-the-wonder-fuel-that-wasnt/ https://thebulletin.org/2014/05/thorium-the-wonder-fuel-that...
- panick21_ 5y ago
  Most of the problems are from nuclear weapons production not civilian reactors. And if you look at the list of causalities its very small amount.
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horsawlarway 5y ago

> there has never been a fucked-up American accident. What are you smoking? This is blatantly false. We've absolutely had meltdowns, and come very damn close to real disaster (as in - evacuating a 20 mile radius including some 600,000 people close)

daniel-cussen 5y ago
> and come very damn close to real disaster That's what I'm smoking. For there to be a fucked-up American accident the accident has to actually happen.

monetus 5y ago

Hanford (in Washington) always sticks in my mind as the most fucked up. Oak ridge has had problems, three mile island too of course, but the reactions were commensurately paranoid. Hanford seems to be incapable of not occasionally poisoning people.

foobar2021 5y ago
For context, the Hanford reactor was built during ww2; around the same age as the presidential candidates from the 2020 USA election.
philipkglass 5y ago
Hanford is definitely the worst, but that's because of its origins as the world's first plutonium production site (first reactor criticality in 1944). Unlike commercial reactors it had to chemically reprocess irradiated fuel because the whole point was extracting plutonium. They were running experiments at industrial scale as they sought better methods for plutonium (and later, uranium-233) extraction. It ran under extreme secrecy in its earlier years, meaning that even by the generally lax standards of pre-EPA chemical facilities it had little environmental/safety oversight. Hanford only ever had one reactor that produced electricity, the N reactor, and that wasn't built until 1963: https://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/NReactor https://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/NReactor
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  Of course there's a worst one, there has to be. Well Hanford didn't principally produce energy, so much as just plutonium, so really its mission was weapon production. So now we're changing the subject a bit, no longer is it about electricity, but defense. So we can address that immediately: without the Hanford site, Japan would not have surrendered without an invasion of the home islands. Maybe not even then. It was the "new and cruel bomb," as the Emperor of Japan described it while citing it as the reason for surrender in his speech. That "new and cruel" bomb meant an alternative to reenacting the Battle of Iwo Jima (which I would describe as "fucked up" for both sides without question) a thousand times. Battles to the last cartridge. Forgetting completely about the lives of Allied and Axis soldiers, you realize the death toll that would have on the civilians of Japan? They were on the hook for all kinds of atrocities all over Asia and the Pacific, in the context of total war they pissed off the rest of the world way too hard for the Allies to declare a truce. Just in Korea alone, the stories are just...let's not talk about that, let's stick to what is fucked up within nuclear science. Japanese were subscribed to the idea that their genocide was preferable to surrender. So that's why the bomb, and by extension the Hanford site, were so important. In practice the nukes in Japan explosives second, fireworks first. Napalm was a much better explosive for the money, in terms of the destruction it could produce. The really bad bombings in WWII were in Tokyo and Dresden, a hundred thousand dead per bombing, a new climactic event called a "Firestorm," terrible burns, pavement getting goopy, high winds--I claim those bombings were worse. But they weren't as flamboyant as a star.

freeflight 5y ago

> there has never been a fucked-up American accident That really depends on your definition of "fucked-up", but there is a long list of nuclear accidents in the US [0], among the more "fucked-up" ones were attempts to dispose of nearly a ton of left-over fissile material in mere landfills [1] and then ultimately losing track of them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_t... [1] https://thebulletin.org/2014/05/thorium-the-wonder-fuel-that-wasnt/ https://thebulletin.org/2014/05/thorium-the-wonder-fuel-that...

panick21_ 5y ago
Most of the problems are from nuclear weapons production not civilian reactors. And if you look at the list of causalities its very small amount.

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