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What "scientific" analysis has claimed "chernobyl can't happen again" ? It would be as ridiculous as someone claiming the new Airbus XXX model can't crash. Even

What "scientific" analysis has claimed "chernobyl can't happen again" ? It would be as ridiculous as someone claiming the new Airbus XXX model can't crash. Even analysis of the type "a chernobyl will happen once every XX years" are more political in nature than scientific, since you are assuming a stable society for decades to come (i.e. no degradation in the skill level of constructors or operators, etc. -- even foreign ones). Which, barring sudden miraculous discoveries in the area of Psychohistory, is basically entirely politics and outside the realm of science.

BurningFrog 4y ago
Chernobyl can't happen again because the awful design that made that failure possible is long ago abandoned. It's a bit like how the Airbus A380 can't crash like the Hindenburg airship did.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  I'm quite sure that no one who asks "can chernobyl can happen again?" is actually interested in the response to "can chernobyl happen again _in exactly the same way_"?. This is malicious nitpicking. In the same way that I'm sure the victims of the next Airbus crash will be happy to know that "it didn't crash like the Hindenburg did".
  - knorker 4y ago
    Is it not malicious to scream "chernobyl!" willfully deceptively or willfully ignorantly confusing what can and cannot happen? More people die every single year from radiation in coal than have died in the entire history of nuclear power. Replacing all coal with nuclear would save more lives and health than fighting nuclear ever could, even in theory. And delaying coal to nuclear under the banner of "wind and solar maybe one day can help a bit" has blood on its hands. Every year coal is still here, instead of nuclear, is 100 years of death. If building powerplants (of any type) were instant, and solar were one year away, then we should STILL replace all coal with nuclear TODAY, to minimize harm. (in a spherical chickens in a vacuum sort of way) And not only do we not have enough solar, we don't even have a plan for energy storage for solar and wind. We have ideas, not a plan. So solar&wind replacing coal&nuclear is further away than fusion power, by multiples.
    - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
      To exemplify the difference between science and politics: - Nuclear is safer than coal: science (true or not, it's not the point) - We need to go all the way nuclear: politics. There's a million other things to consider, many of them don't even each into the realm of what is falsifiable (e.g international relations, fuel availability, who knows). _Even_ if nuclear was literally the safest method ever, it is literally still politics whether to use nuclear or not; after all, we sacrifice safety for convenience _many_ times, and good luck defining "convenience" in a scientific way. Another example: - Vaccines are safe and effective (scientific; true or not is not the point) - Vaccines are safe enough compared to the risk of catching the disease itself ("social" sciences; caveat emptor) - We should force everyone to vaccinate (politics). It does not matter if vaccines are safe, or not. It is still a political topic, not scientific. There are things like ethics, social vs individual rights, etc. that are hardly quantifiable much less scientific.
      - knorker 4y ago
        I don't think this is relevant to my point. Not wrong, just not relevant. Individuals who are anti nuclear have reasons, explicitly stated, that are misinformed. Being anti nuclear because Chernobyl is in fact like being anti airplane because Hindenburg. The criticism is actually (in this analogy) that they claim the hydrogen in a 747 will catch fire. "It's not hydrogen, it's just filled with oxygen and nitrogen" is met with "then what if that spontaneously combusts?!". But in a way you make a good point. "I don't want to have a rational discussion or learn anything" is indeed the anti nuclear stance. "I don't want the truth, i just want to be right" is political. The other things you mention are not really even known to anti nuclear people. Wanting to be right despite facts or ignorance is almost the definition of politics. People say they're anti nuclear because they want to spare us radiation and death, but when you tell them nuclear would reduce both then they just scream louder. You can be factually wrong in politics. When your stated and internal reasons don't align with what your actions will accomplish, then that's wrong.
      - bawolff 4y ago
        These are bad examples. "Vaccines are safe and effective" is not scientific because science can deal with comparisons, it cannot deal with absolutes. You can scientificly say something is safe compared to something else, or define safe in some way (less then 1 in X chance of something happening statistically). But there is no such thing as 100% absolute safety. Even an injection with saline is not safe in the absolute. E.g. if there is a 1 in a trillion chance of a side effect, you will never see it, because there arent a trillion people on earth.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    If all you mean by "chernobyl happening again" is "a serious accident could happen", you've moved the goalposts beyond where I think meaningful discussion is possible. It also means that a "new chernobyl" can happen at any power station, be it hydro, coal, solar, etc.
    - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
      > If all you mean by "chernobyl happening again" is "a serious accident could happen", you've moved the goalposts beyond where I think meaningful discussion is possible. WTF? Chernobyl will NEVER happen exactly the same way again, that much is obvious since a) it was already a pretty rare event to begin with, b) the event is likely referenced during the training of every nuclear operator _worldwide_, making an exact repeat of the human errors involved even more unlikely than it was to begin with, c) steps were taken to avoid this exact situation to happen _even on the other chernobyl reactors themselves_. I thought it quite obvious that no one would be worried about a exact repeat of Chernobyl like if you hit the "replay" button on YouTube. (But if you believe this is what people have in mind when they ask "can chernobyl happen again" then please do tell). Therefore the only remaining interpretation is "can a chernobyl[-like] event happen again" -- a category which would roughly map to "major historic nuclear accident, the kind of which it is still talked about several decades after on a non-nuclear discussion forum like HN". Most assuredly, non-nuclear accidents, no matter how large, won't fit this category. But I have been wrong in the past, maybe people would call a dam breakup "a chernobyl" these days?
      - BurningFrog 4y ago
        OK, I'll clarify: Modern reactors all have a containment shell made of concrete and steel that is capable of keeping the melted down uranium core inside it, if the worst possible event would happen. Had Chernobyl had this, the incident might have destroyed the reactor and even killed some employees, but that would have been the end of it, and the world would never even have heard about the incident. There are also plenty of other security improvements since that ancient design, but the containment shell alone makes what I would call "chernobyl happening again" just about impossible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment_building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment_building Biggest dam accident is arguably worse than Chernobyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
  - elgenie 4y ago
    Distinguishing between failure modes isn’t nitpicking when the difference is between the plant being totaled for the purposes of future power generation as opposed to spewing radioactivity over a third of a continent. An Airbus that loses an engine and has to immediately land has objectively failed; however, acting like that’s equivalent to a plane homing into a skyscraper and exploding is not helpful.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- tobias3 4y ago
  RBMK-1000 is actually still in use in Russia at three locations (they obviously fixed the bug that lead to the disaster, so it won't repeat 1:1...). That also points at one issue. All the now >50 year old reactors should have been replaced with newer versions at some point. Just think about what kind of electronics there is in those things. This didn't happen anywhere. Not in Germany and not in France.
  - cogman10 4y ago
    > All the now >50 year old reactors should have been replaced with newer versions at some point. Seems like an issue with how humans think in general. "It's not an issue now, so why worry about it?" These sorts of creeping disasters never seem to be addressed by any society in a timely fashion.
hedora 4y ago
Here's an article from 2018 describing a commercial implementation of a reactor that cannot melt down. (The technology was decades old at that point.) https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/01/24/can-we-make-a-nuclear-reactor-that-wont-melt-down/?sh=6539547b5b7e https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/01/24/can-we-ma...
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  There is a big stretch from a "manufacturer claims my reactor design can't be hacked" to "chernobyl can't happen again", and neither is still a scientific claim. The problem that I was trying to show is that people try to answer a question "can a chernobyl(-like) event ever happen again?" which one simply _can't answer_. Not in a "science" way, since to answer this question you need to predict the existence (not probability!) of a literal _punctual_ event which depends on a gazillion factors outside your control (i.e. this is not simply computing a MTBF).
- yk 4y ago
  A article reiterating a press release from a company that doesn't have a prototype is not exactly a good source. And at any rate, the article claims that > The small size and large surface area-to-volume ratio of NuScale’s reactor core, that sits below ground in a super seismic-resistant heat sink, allows natural processes to cool it indefinitely in the case of complete power blackout. Of course, the surface that allows efficient cooling here is the same surface that allows neutrons to escape, so my hunch is that it has poor neutron economy. (And of course, heat escaping through it will not turn turbines.) > 2) refueling of this reactor does not require the nuclear plant to shut down. That is very nice when you're trying to breed plutonium, the natural uranium fuel assemblies only have to irradiated a few weeks and then you would already need to shut the reactor down. When you can switch during operation, than there's less downtime. So in total I guess it's a pretty inefficient reactor that's perhaps a nice addition to your weapons program. Disclaimer: I'm of course one of the anti-nuclear types HN always tells me are only anti-nuclear because we don't understand these things.
  - philipkglass 4y ago
walnutclosefarm 4y ago
If by "Chernobyl" you mean any nuclear accident that results in some kind of radiation release, then of course, it is a possibility as long as we build any kind of nuclear reactor. But if by "Chernobyl" we mean a massive explosion of an uncontained reactor that contaminates thousand of square kilomoters of land severely, and spreads some degree of contamination across continental areas, then it's an entirely different story. It is possible to build reactors that simply don't have a catastrophic failure mode like the Soviet RBMK, or evenm like those of 1950s and 1960s designs for BWR (used at Fukushima) or PWR (Three Mile Island). Any design can fail, of course, but how they fail, matters.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  And even if a chernobyl as in the massive explosion were to happen yearly, it'd still be much less deaths than coal, for example.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
A MSR/LFTR can simply have a heat plug and a "cooling pool" where the fuel spreads out (the pool is not actively cooled at all). So if the reaction is going off the rails, the plug melts, the liquid disperses in the pool, and neutron economy cliffdives and the fuel stops reacting automatically A solid fuel rod just needs the right disruption, and you have a meltdown. It's inherent to solid fuel designs because they are ... solid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Fukushima_Daii... I look at that timeline and all the active systems that are necessary in solid fuel rod. LFTR doesn't need those to cool, it is a somewhat self-regulating design. There's no high-pressure steam to worry about regulating. Additionally LFTR: 1) breeds its fuel from Thorium, a low radioactivity element, so some stockpile of heavily radioactive stuff isn't hanging around. 2) "burns" most/all of its fuel, so there isn't some stockpile of bad waste that can get washed away. I'm not sure if pebble bed type stuff or other schemes could have similar guarantees, and it's not like an underwater LFTR wouldn't have lots of strange elements leaking, but there are so many failure events in that fukushima timeline that IMO a LFTR design would have simply shut down and no big deal. http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/timeline/ http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/timeline/ Again, all those pressure events and active cooling system failure points. LFTR is generally an unproven design, but it has so many good features that I view it as the starting point of next gen nuclear. I think its scalability is the key to nuclear's relevance in the future to compete economically with mature solar/wind/battery. To get back to your point about the politics: the current nuclear industry... the lobbyists, the regulators, the "culture" ... is gravitationally bound with the solid fuel rod design. A clean slate is needed, and wind/solar sweeping away the economically unviable and inherently dangerous old designs and their political structures is probably doing nuclear a favor in the long run.

BurningFrog 4y ago

Chernobyl can't happen again because the awful design that made that failure possible is long ago abandoned. It's a bit like how the Airbus A380 can't crash like the Hindenburg airship did.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
I'm quite sure that no one who asks "can chernobyl can happen again?" is actually interested in the response to "can chernobyl happen again _in exactly the same way_"?. This is malicious nitpicking. In the same way that I'm sure the victims of the next Airbus crash will be happy to know that "it didn't crash like the Hindenburg did".
- knorker 4y ago
  Is it not malicious to scream "chernobyl!" willfully deceptively or willfully ignorantly confusing what can and cannot happen? More people die every single year from radiation in coal than have died in the entire history of nuclear power. Replacing all coal with nuclear would save more lives and health than fighting nuclear ever could, even in theory. And delaying coal to nuclear under the banner of "wind and solar maybe one day can help a bit" has blood on its hands. Every year coal is still here, instead of nuclear, is 100 years of death. If building powerplants (of any type) were instant, and solar were one year away, then we should STILL replace all coal with nuclear TODAY, to minimize harm. (in a spherical chickens in a vacuum sort of way) And not only do we not have enough solar, we don't even have a plan for energy storage for solar and wind. We have ideas, not a plan. So solar&wind replacing coal&nuclear is further away than fusion power, by multiples.
  - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    To exemplify the difference between science and politics: - Nuclear is safer than coal: science (true or not, it's not the point) - We need to go all the way nuclear: politics. There's a million other things to consider, many of them don't even each into the realm of what is falsifiable (e.g international relations, fuel availability, who knows). _Even_ if nuclear was literally the safest method ever, it is literally still politics whether to use nuclear or not; after all, we sacrifice safety for convenience _many_ times, and good luck defining "convenience" in a scientific way. Another example: - Vaccines are safe and effective (scientific; true or not is not the point) - Vaccines are safe enough compared to the risk of catching the disease itself ("social" sciences; caveat emptor) - We should force everyone to vaccinate (politics). It does not matter if vaccines are safe, or not. It is still a political topic, not scientific. There are things like ethics, social vs individual rights, etc. that are hardly quantifiable much less scientific.
    - knorker 4y ago
      I don't think this is relevant to my point. Not wrong, just not relevant. Individuals who are anti nuclear have reasons, explicitly stated, that are misinformed. Being anti nuclear because Chernobyl is in fact like being anti airplane because Hindenburg. The criticism is actually (in this analogy) that they claim the hydrogen in a 747 will catch fire. "It's not hydrogen, it's just filled with oxygen and nitrogen" is met with "then what if that spontaneously combusts?!". But in a way you make a good point. "I don't want to have a rational discussion or learn anything" is indeed the anti nuclear stance. "I don't want the truth, i just want to be right" is political. The other things you mention are not really even known to anti nuclear people. Wanting to be right despite facts or ignorance is almost the definition of politics. People say they're anti nuclear because they want to spare us radiation and death, but when you tell them nuclear would reduce both then they just scream louder. You can be factually wrong in politics. When your stated and internal reasons don't align with what your actions will accomplish, then that's wrong.
    - bawolff 4y ago
      These are bad examples. "Vaccines are safe and effective" is not scientific because science can deal with comparisons, it cannot deal with absolutes. You can scientificly say something is safe compared to something else, or define safe in some way (less then 1 in X chance of something happening statistically). But there is no such thing as 100% absolute safety. Even an injection with saline is not safe in the absolute. E.g. if there is a 1 in a trillion chance of a side effect, you will never see it, because there arent a trillion people on earth.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  If all you mean by "chernobyl happening again" is "a serious accident could happen", you've moved the goalposts beyond where I think meaningful discussion is possible. It also means that a "new chernobyl" can happen at any power station, be it hydro, coal, solar, etc.
  - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    > If all you mean by "chernobyl happening again" is "a serious accident could happen", you've moved the goalposts beyond where I think meaningful discussion is possible. WTF? Chernobyl will NEVER happen exactly the same way again, that much is obvious since a) it was already a pretty rare event to begin with, b) the event is likely referenced during the training of every nuclear operator _worldwide_, making an exact repeat of the human errors involved even more unlikely than it was to begin with, c) steps were taken to avoid this exact situation to happen _even on the other chernobyl reactors themselves_. I thought it quite obvious that no one would be worried about a exact repeat of Chernobyl like if you hit the "replay" button on YouTube. (But if you believe this is what people have in mind when they ask "can chernobyl happen again" then please do tell). Therefore the only remaining interpretation is "can a chernobyl[-like] event happen again" -- a category which would roughly map to "major historic nuclear accident, the kind of which it is still talked about several decades after on a non-nuclear discussion forum like HN". Most assuredly, non-nuclear accidents, no matter how large, won't fit this category. But I have been wrong in the past, maybe people would call a dam breakup "a chernobyl" these days?
    - BurningFrog 4y ago
      OK, I'll clarify: Modern reactors all have a containment shell made of concrete and steel that is capable of keeping the melted down uranium core inside it, if the worst possible event would happen. Had Chernobyl had this, the incident might have destroyed the reactor and even killed some employees, but that would have been the end of it, and the world would never even have heard about the incident. There are also plenty of other security improvements since that ancient design, but the containment shell alone makes what I would call "chernobyl happening again" just about impossible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment_building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment_building Biggest dam accident is arguably worse than Chernobyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
- elgenie 4y ago
  Distinguishing between failure modes isn’t nitpicking when the difference is between the plant being totaled for the purposes of future power generation as opposed to spewing radioactivity over a third of a continent. An Airbus that loses an engine and has to immediately land has objectively failed; however, acting like that’s equivalent to a plane homing into a skyscraper and exploding is not helpful.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
tobias3 4y ago
RBMK-1000 is actually still in use in Russia at three locations (they obviously fixed the bug that lead to the disaster, so it won't repeat 1:1...). That also points at one issue. All the now >50 year old reactors should have been replaced with newer versions at some point. Just think about what kind of electronics there is in those things. This didn't happen anywhere. Not in Germany and not in France.
- cogman10 4y ago
  > All the now >50 year old reactors should have been replaced with newer versions at some point. Seems like an issue with how humans think in general. "It's not an issue now, so why worry about it?" These sorts of creeping disasters never seem to be addressed by any society in a timely fashion.

hedora 4y ago

Here's an article from 2018 describing a commercial implementation of a reactor that cannot melt down. (The technology was decades old at that point.) https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/01/24/can-we-make-a-nuclear-reactor-that-wont-melt-down/?sh=6539547b5b7e https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/01/24/can-we-ma...

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
There is a big stretch from a "manufacturer claims my reactor design can't be hacked" to "chernobyl can't happen again", and neither is still a scientific claim. The problem that I was trying to show is that people try to answer a question "can a chernobyl(-like) event ever happen again?" which one simply _can't answer_. Not in a "science" way, since to answer this question you need to predict the existence (not probability!) of a literal _punctual_ event which depends on a gazillion factors outside your control (i.e. this is not simply computing a MTBF).
yk 4y ago
A article reiterating a press release from a company that doesn't have a prototype is not exactly a good source. And at any rate, the article claims that > The small size and large surface area-to-volume ratio of NuScale’s reactor core, that sits below ground in a super seismic-resistant heat sink, allows natural processes to cool it indefinitely in the case of complete power blackout. Of course, the surface that allows efficient cooling here is the same surface that allows neutrons to escape, so my hunch is that it has poor neutron economy. (And of course, heat escaping through it will not turn turbines.) > 2) refueling of this reactor does not require the nuclear plant to shut down. That is very nice when you're trying to breed plutonium, the natural uranium fuel assemblies only have to irradiated a few weeks and then you would already need to shut the reactor down. When you can switch during operation, than there's less downtime. So in total I guess it's a pretty inefficient reactor that's perhaps a nice addition to your weapons program. Disclaimer: I'm of course one of the anti-nuclear types HN always tells me are only anti-nuclear because we don't understand these things.
- philipkglass 4y ago

walnutclosefarm 4y ago

If by "Chernobyl" you mean any nuclear accident that results in some kind of radiation release, then of course, it is a possibility as long as we build any kind of nuclear reactor. But if by "Chernobyl" we mean a massive explosion of an uncontained reactor that contaminates thousand of square kilomoters of land severely, and spreads some degree of contamination across continental areas, then it's an entirely different story. It is possible to build reactors that simply don't have a catastrophic failure mode like the Soviet RBMK, or evenm like those of 1950s and 1960s designs for BWR (used at Fukushima) or PWR (Three Mile Island). Any design can fail, of course, but how they fail, matters.

Akronymus 4y ago
And even if a chernobyl as in the massive explosion were to happen yearly, it'd still be much less deaths than coal, for example.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

A MSR/LFTR can simply have a heat plug and a "cooling pool" where the fuel spreads out (the pool is not actively cooled at all). So if the reaction is going off the rails, the plug melts, the liquid disperses in the pool, and neutron economy cliffdives and the fuel stops reacting automatically A solid fuel rod just needs the right disruption, and you have a meltdown. It's inherent to solid fuel designs because they are ... solid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Fukushima_Daii... I look at that timeline and all the active systems that are necessary in solid fuel rod. LFTR doesn't need those to cool, it is a somewhat self-regulating design. There's no high-pressure steam to worry about regulating. Additionally LFTR: 1) breeds its fuel from Thorium, a low radioactivity element, so some stockpile of heavily radioactive stuff isn't hanging around. 2) "burns" most/all of its fuel, so there isn't some stockpile of bad waste that can get washed away. I'm not sure if pebble bed type stuff or other schemes could have similar guarantees, and it's not like an underwater LFTR wouldn't have lots of strange elements leaking, but there are so many failure events in that fukushima timeline that IMO a LFTR design would have simply shut down and no big deal. http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/timeline/ http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/timeline/ Again, all those pressure events and active cooling system failure points. LFTR is generally an unproven design, but it has so many good features that I view it as the starting point of next gen nuclear. I think its scalability is the key to nuclear's relevance in the future to compete economically with mature solar/wind/battery. To get back to your point about the politics: the current nuclear industry... the lobbyists, the regulators, the "culture" ... is gravitationally bound with the solid fuel rod design. A clean slate is needed, and wind/solar sweeping away the economically unviable and inherently dangerous old designs and their political structures is probably doing nuclear a favor in the long run.