8 ms·

How safe are nuclear power plants?

57 points by fortran77 4y ago

socialdemocrat 4y ago
Puts the claims that the nuclear industry is over-regulated in a different light. Maybe it is, but this article clearly show why it had to evolve that way.
andbberger 4y ago
extremely safe. the US navy has operated old reactor designs with less inherent safety features than modern designs for over 5000 reactor-years with no major incidents. [0] [0] https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/security/fact0604.pdf https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/security/fact0604...
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  The US Navy utilizes highly enriched uranium reactors that don't have to be refueled every few years, I think it's more like a 20 year lifetime between refueling. Unfortunately this is not an acceptable civilian model as HEU is bomb-grade, i.e. it's very easy to take the fuel rods and turn them into simple Hiroshima-style nuclear weapons. Also, the US Navy lost two submarines, and the Scorpion case in particular might have been related to a nuclear power plant failure, although there's been no comprehensive report as of yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589)
  - pdonis 4y ago
    > the US Navy lost two submarines The Thresher was a subsafe accident (a problem with one of the weld joints that keep the hull from being breached at depth); it had nothing to do with the reactor. The Scorpion's root cause wasn't a reactor problem; note that "reactor problem" is not one of the hypotheses listed in "theories about the loss" in the Wikipedia article you reference.
    - pvaldes 4y ago
      Ok. No major incidents except those that we don't want to talk about, like: "dude, where is my nuclear reactor?".
      - pdonis 4y ago
        > "dude, where is my nuclear reactor?" What are you talking about?
        pvaldes 4y ago
        If you lose a nuclear submarine it does not matter how it sank, Some nuclear stuff is lost and lying somewhere in a place when can't be safely maintained. It was not designed to end its life like that so, of course that this was a major incident, a significant deviation from the master plan!. Only a fool would think that just because you don't see it, the problem is gone. But the nuclear evangelists did never learn that lesson. They keep denying, closing their eyes, talking like is still 1950; saying that we can hide under a picnic tablecloth in case of nuclear accident.
        pdonis 4y ago
        > Some nuclear stuff is lost and lying somewhere And as the Wikipedia article referenced in the post I originally responded to makes clear, the Navy doesn't just leave the stuff there; it keeps track of it and monitors the state of the nuclear materials in it. So there are contingency plans in place for incidents like this, even though they are extremely rare (2 of them in all of the decades that the US Navy has been operating nuclear submarines). And no harm has come to any member of the public as a result of either of these incidents. So talking as though this represents a serious danger to the public is not warranted. Also, these are military reactors, not commercial reactors. Commercial reactors can't get lost this way. So using the Navy examples as though they reflected the risks of commercial reactors is ridiculous.
- strainer 4y ago
  5000 reactor-years is very little in comparison to the amount which would count up if similar units were somehow economically rolled out for industry. To play any significant part in global energy supply hundreds or moreso thousands of these would need to be operated, each for decades. And by civilians - some liable to fail to match military standards of operation. 5000 reactor-years is really a tiny fraction of what many people are interested in.
  - andbberger 4y ago
    the anti-nuclear folks throw around "long tail" and "black swan" a lot, but if you're turning your nose up when met with the hard data of "operated for 5000 years with no incidents" then we're truly doomed. > civilians couldn't possibly operate reactors safely inane, but ok simply make the navy operate the power grid
    - strainer 4y ago
      That is 1 reactor for 5000 years, or 5000 reactors for 1 year. It really is not much hard data in the context of regulating hundreds or thousands of reactors for decades. 5000 hard drive years, wouldn't even inform a hard drive failure rate.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
nathantotten 4y ago
From Nate Silver: “This article is full of terrible statistical logic. Yes, it's hard to exactly quantify the risk of a highly deadly nuclear accident. By nature, tail events are rare. There is intrinsically some guesswork. But empirically the chances are very low. The author also blatantly cheats by counting Fukushima as 3 separate accidents, as though they occurred independently from one another and didn't have a common cause like oh I dunno a magnitude 9 earthquake.“ https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1558530091860336640?s=21&t=zizrFNDdYg5jhhpEwBLeBQ https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1558530091860336640...
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Also zero people died in the immediate aftermath of Fukushima, and one employee sadly eventually died years later of a cancer that's being attributed to it after receiving an annual dose of radiation in the incident. Counting it as anything other than an indication of how safe these plants have gotten is pretty disingenuous. The data is clear, it's the safest form of energy in deaths per TWh generated. [1] Anyways while we fitter around and argue, China is building 150 new reactors in the next 15 years, as much as the entire world has built in the last 35. To go with their massive solar deployment. Now that's an energy grid getting cleaned up neatly. [2] [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
  - Teknoman117 4y ago
    It's almost nutty to me that the number of workers who've fallen to their deaths from wind turbines per GWh is more than the number of people killed by nuclear power accidents and maintenance per GWh.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      Doesn't surprise me at all really. And it doesn't even necessarily mean it's irrational to prefer living near a wind turbine farm than a nuke plant, given most people aren't turbine engineers. I also imagine it's a statistic that will change considerably with time as we build out wind farms, especially if doing so can largely be automated. At any rate, we need both (given the current state of affairs). I doubt the choice to build one or other is going to come down to deaths-per-GWh.
photochemsyn 4y ago
It's basically a 'black swan' problem. Even if the average risk of catastrophic failure is low, the consequences are very high, particularly if the plant is near a populated area that might be converted into a 50-mile radius 'exclusion zone'. Imagine, for example, if Indian Point nuclear power plants suffered a catastrophic failure and forced evacuation of Manhattan? Practically this means costs of nuclear power plants are very high, as you have to over-engineer them relative to other power sources. Natural gas and coal plant accidents are relatively common, for example; similarly oil refineries suffer fires on a regular basis. However, Texas City (site of a major BP disaster in 2005) is not currently a 100-year no-go-zone. Here's a 5-minute video on how that played out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9JY3eT4cdM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9JY3eT4cdM Point being, there's no way to reduce nuclear power upfront costs without also introducing unacceptable risks, and that's a major reason why nuclear isn't going to replace fossil fuels on a global scale (along with the uranium ore to fuel rod to waste pile supply chain issues,decommissioning costs, etc.) There's no catastrophic failure mode for a solar/wind/storage based grid, and that's one of several reasons why nuclear will remain little more than a niche provider.
- a9h74j 4y ago
  > There's no catastrophic failure mode for a solar/wind/storage based grid Not to start the usual HN debate, but specifically in terms of the word 'catastrophe' being used. ... [Given current lack of storage] if there is lack of wind for two weeks and people are freezing in the UK, that could be a kind of high-severity catastrophe. A weather-system-related wind failure is a kind of common mode failure mechanism in that it can affect many nominally independent generators at once. I agree regional damage from worst-case nuclear could be a different level of severity. Caveats about "well that's why long-distance transmission" granted.
  - ajross 4y ago
    > Not to start the usual HN debate Then maybe don't throw up a giant strawman? No one is advocating for an exclusively wind-based power grid, so why pretend they are? Real systems won't have the failure mode you posit. In fact real grids (c.f. the Republic of Texas, or for that matter most of the developing world) are operating today with genuinely terrible reliability without the kind of "high-severity catastrophe" you are analogizing to a nuclear meltdown.
a9h74j 4y ago
Good reporting here, of the kind one can crave for these days. For anyone familiar (or concerned) with saftey-critical work, appears to deserve careful reading. Not necessarily mentioned (I haven't finished reading), but part of the apparent gist-of-the-concern: Challenger accident and normalization of deviance.
BMc2020 4y ago
- michael_nielsen 4y ago
  You evidently didn't read the article.
  - BMc2020 4y ago
    I have, so many times I didn't feel the need to read this particular one. Was there something new?
  - BMc2020 4y ago
    Huh, turns out I did and had completely forgotten it. Check my history if you don't believe. 1 point by BMc2020 4 days ago | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: How Safe Are Nuclear Power Plants? And yet my own studies on reactor safety—which include papers co-authored with the late M.I.T. physicist and Nobel laureate Henry Kendall, and several books based on extensive reporting for this magazine—have concluded that nuclear power’s potential contribution to clean energy has been compromised by safety shortcuts taken by the industry, and by lax government regulation of day-to-day safety practices at the plants.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- _joel 4y ago
  The irony of saying nuclear propoganda is so repetitive when we literally define 48 hours as (9,192,631,770 * 172800) or 1.5884868e+15 'oscillations' of a caesium 133 atom (133Cs). It's almost as if it means something!
wishawa 4y ago
> federal regulators consistently assured Americans that the risks of a massive accident were “vanishingly small”—even when they knew they had insufficient evidence to prove it Why is the burden of proof on them? Nuclear should be innocent until proven guilty just like any other technology. Once the principle design has been shown to be sound, it should be the job of those opposing it to prove claims of unsafeness.
- switchbak 4y ago
  Absolutely not. We know what happens in the worst case, so in this regard an abundance of precaution is most certainly appropriate. As to how far you go to ensure safe designs, that's a question, but I don't think it's appropriate to 'assume the best' in this case, given the huge potential downsides. And I'm someone who's pretty supportive of modern and safe nuclear!
- sillystuff 4y ago
  Disagree with this part: "Nuclear should be innocent until proven guilty..." Fully agree with this part: "...just like any other technology" The assumption of safe until proven dangerous should be flipped wherever it currently prevails. If X wants to add some novel thing into our environment / food supply, the burden should be on X to prove safety, first.
  - AstralStorm 4y ago
    We have sufficient evidence from France and Germany that safe reactor designs are safe.
    - Baloo 4y ago
      Aren't France shutting down a large number of plants due to safety issues?
      - BurningFrog 4y ago
        Looked this up, and France is having several nuclear problems at once, including that rivers used for cooling is getting too warm in the summer. Some of it is indeed security concerns in aging reactors. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-power-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...
kens 4y ago
> After the Three Mile Island incident, a Presidential commission, chaired by John Kemeny, the mathematician and president of Dartmouth College, issued a sobering report. As a random historical note that might be interesting to HN, Kemeny was also the co-inventor of the BASIC language.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  Kemeny ruined Dartmouth College and BASIC was far behind the state of the art in programming languages at the time.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    It's irrelevant because the purpose of BASIC is to teach principles of computer programming, not to be a useful language in itself: https://basic256.org/2019/06/27/why-another-basic/ https://basic256.org/2019/06/27/why-another-basic/
    - TMWNN 4y ago
      Indeed. Dartmouth in the 1960s and 1970s, with the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (with a BASIC-driven UI), had * computer terminals everywhere, including libraries, dorms, offices, and even the medical clinic * many classes (not just computer science or math) requiring use of the terminals for various tasks * a widespread culture among students and faculty (again, not just computer science or math) of use of the terminals for work and play (games, email, chat) * more computer terminals at dozens of off-campus locations, including high schools, other universities, and Dartmouth alumni clubs It is not an exaggeration to say that Dartmouth c. 1970 had the world's most widely used and widespread computer network, exceeding anything at MIT, Stanford, or UIUC.
      - wrycoder 4y ago
        Nice network. But Dartmouth BASIC was a primitive language that encouraged unmaintainable spaghetti code. (This was not too bad, if the programs were twenty lines long, I guess.)
bluSCALE4 4y ago
Is anyone else in asshole mode like me where I'd rather see all unsafe plants replaced before breaking new ground? This, let's ignore our ticking time bombs approach doesn't fly with me, lest we forget Fukushima is still a thing.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  I am in this camp. I want a "modern" nuclear design that isn't rooted in what the previous regime considered "safe". I want near 100% fuel consumption so there's no or far far less nuclear waste. LFTR allegedly does this (allegedly can use old solid fuel rod waste too) I want meltdown-proof design inherent to the reactor. LFTR has a self-moderating design and has a plug leading to a pool that separates the fluid fuel so it no longer is fissile. I want is scalable in size. And it has to be economical with solar/wind. LFTR probably has materials problems, but the chinese are giving one a go. We'll see. I don't think nuclear will cost competitive without a new round of approaches/designs. I don't think any current design will cut it, economically, safety in operation, safety in waste reduction/no transport, etc.
  - AstralStorm 4y ago
    Even without LFTR, the new liquid metal/salt cooled reactors have a self-moderating design. (LMFR or LMFBR respectively) They could be modified to be multipass reactors too, and already reduce waste a lot. The problem with multipass reactors is that fuel enrichment is the way to explosives... It took a long time to achieve safety with these liquid metal/salt cooled reactors, as Japanese can tell.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > Fukushima is still a thing There's an easy way to avoid future Fukushimas that has nothing to do with any change in nuclear reactor design: don't site your backup power switchgear in a place that could get inundated with water. (Note that all of the other reactors at the Fukushima site had this--and none of them had any problems after the earthquake and tsunami.) "Ticking time bombs" is not a valid description of any commercial nuclear plant. Building newer, safer designs in the future is great, but even without considering any of those designs, nuclear energy is by far the safest form of energy per unit of energy generated. Imagine if we had been smart in the 1970s and 1980s and started building nuclear reactors everywhere to replace coal and oil. We could be in a position now where no fossil fuels needed to be burned anywhere on the planet. To deny ourselves this because "Fukushima!" is foolish.
BurningFrog 4y ago
What annoys me the most about Fukushima is that 19,747 people died in that event. Mostly by drowning. None in the nuclear accident. And yet that is what is remembered as the big disaster that day.
- sofixa 4y ago
  And an oil tank fire caused by the same tsunami and earthquake killed more people than the nuclear incident and destroyed a whole city.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  You also wonder if any sort of cost benefit analysis was done over decisions to mothball nuclear power plants after said event, compared, say, to restricting the building of houses in areas prone to tsunami damage (there's plenty of good reasons we need to stop living so close to shorelines yet it seems as popular as ever).
- pvaldes 4y ago
  because the nuclear accident... is still a problem... more than a decade later... because... ... it was a nuclear accident While the other problem was closed ten years ago
  - jdmg94 4y ago
    In the US they still have people from Hurricane Katrina on FEMA trailers, natural disasters take a long time to recover from which is contrary to public perception that its solved cause its out of the news cycle
RappingBoomer 4y ago
the fossil fuel lobby probably senses a growing acceptance of nuke power among the younger generations... expect to see more like this article
- wizofaus 4y ago
  Interesting point - we have pretty solid evidence of vested interests funding anything that will help their short/medium term bottom line, surely at least some of that might be big coal/gas funding research that "demonstrates" how unsafe nuclear power is?
hammyhavoc 4y ago
Safer than houses.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
EricE 4y ago
What a sensationalistic piece of trash. It's time to voraciously naming, shame and SHUN publications who insist on selfishly fear mongering to get clicks.
phs318u 4y ago
I keep pointing this out - I'll be more than happy to see nuclear power plants where I live, when the industry is happy to operate in the absence of the Price-Anderson act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear... Until then, NIMBY.

57 points by fortran77 4y ago

Puts the claims that the nuclear industry is over-regulated in a different light. Maybe it is, but this article clearly show why it had to evolve that way.

andbberger 4y ago

extremely safe. the US navy has operated old reactor designs with less inherent safety features than modern designs for over 5000 reactor-years with no major incidents. [0] [0] https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/security/fact0604.pdf https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/security/fact0604...

photochemsyn 4y ago
The US Navy utilizes highly enriched uranium reactors that don't have to be refueled every few years, I think it's more like a 20 year lifetime between refueling. Unfortunately this is not an acceptable civilian model as HEU is bomb-grade, i.e. it's very easy to take the fuel rods and turn them into simple Hiroshima-style nuclear weapons. Also, the US Navy lost two submarines, and the Scorpion case in particular might have been related to a nuclear power plant failure, although there's been no comprehensive report as of yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589)
- pdonis 4y ago
  > the US Navy lost two submarines The Thresher was a subsafe accident (a problem with one of the weld joints that keep the hull from being breached at depth); it had nothing to do with the reactor. The Scorpion's root cause wasn't a reactor problem; note that "reactor problem" is not one of the hypotheses listed in "theories about the loss" in the Wikipedia article you reference.
  - pvaldes 4y ago
    Ok. No major incidents except those that we don't want to talk about, like: "dude, where is my nuclear reactor?".
    - pdonis 4y ago
      > "dude, where is my nuclear reactor?" What are you talking about?
      - pvaldes 4y ago
        If you lose a nuclear submarine it does not matter how it sank, Some nuclear stuff is lost and lying somewhere in a place when can't be safely maintained. It was not designed to end its life like that so, of course that this was a major incident, a significant deviation from the master plan!. Only a fool would think that just because you don't see it, the problem is gone. But the nuclear evangelists did never learn that lesson. They keep denying, closing their eyes, talking like is still 1950; saying that we can hide under a picnic tablecloth in case of nuclear accident.
        pdonis 4y ago
        > Some nuclear stuff is lost and lying somewhere And as the Wikipedia article referenced in the post I originally responded to makes clear, the Navy doesn't just leave the stuff there; it keeps track of it and monitors the state of the nuclear materials in it. So there are contingency plans in place for incidents like this, even though they are extremely rare (2 of them in all of the decades that the US Navy has been operating nuclear submarines). And no harm has come to any member of the public as a result of either of these incidents. So talking as though this represents a serious danger to the public is not warranted. Also, these are military reactors, not commercial reactors. Commercial reactors can't get lost this way. So using the Navy examples as though they reflected the risks of commercial reactors is ridiculous.
strainer 4y ago
5000 reactor-years is very little in comparison to the amount which would count up if similar units were somehow economically rolled out for industry. To play any significant part in global energy supply hundreds or moreso thousands of these would need to be operated, each for decades. And by civilians - some liable to fail to match military standards of operation. 5000 reactor-years is really a tiny fraction of what many people are interested in.
- andbberger 4y ago
  the anti-nuclear folks throw around "long tail" and "black swan" a lot, but if you're turning your nose up when met with the hard data of "operated for 5000 years with no incidents" then we're truly doomed. > civilians couldn't possibly operate reactors safely inane, but ok simply make the navy operate the power grid
  - strainer 4y ago
    That is 1 reactor for 5000 years, or 5000 reactors for 1 year. It really is not much hard data in the context of regulating hundreds or thousands of reactors for decades. 5000 hard drive years, wouldn't even inform a hard drive failure rate.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

nathantotten 4y ago

From Nate Silver: “This article is full of terrible statistical logic. Yes, it's hard to exactly quantify the risk of a highly deadly nuclear accident. By nature, tail events are rare. There is intrinsically some guesswork. But empirically the chances are very low. The author also blatantly cheats by counting Fukushima as 3 separate accidents, as though they occurred independently from one another and didn't have a common cause like oh I dunno a magnitude 9 earthquake.“ https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1558530091860336640?s=21&t=zizrFNDdYg5jhhpEwBLeBQ https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1558530091860336640...

arcticbull 4y ago
Also zero people died in the immediate aftermath of Fukushima, and one employee sadly eventually died years later of a cancer that's being attributed to it after receiving an annual dose of radiation in the incident. Counting it as anything other than an indication of how safe these plants have gotten is pretty disingenuous. The data is clear, it's the safest form of energy in deaths per TWh generated. [1] Anyways while we fitter around and argue, China is building 150 new reactors in the next 15 years, as much as the entire world has built in the last 35. To go with their massive solar deployment. Now that's an energy grid getting cleaned up neatly. [2] [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
- Teknoman117 4y ago
  It's almost nutty to me that the number of workers who've fallen to their deaths from wind turbines per GWh is more than the number of people killed by nuclear power accidents and maintenance per GWh.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    Doesn't surprise me at all really. And it doesn't even necessarily mean it's irrational to prefer living near a wind turbine farm than a nuke plant, given most people aren't turbine engineers. I also imagine it's a statistic that will change considerably with time as we build out wind farms, especially if doing so can largely be automated. At any rate, we need both (given the current state of affairs). I doubt the choice to build one or other is going to come down to deaths-per-GWh.

photochemsyn 4y ago

It's basically a 'black swan' problem. Even if the average risk of catastrophic failure is low, the consequences are very high, particularly if the plant is near a populated area that might be converted into a 50-mile radius 'exclusion zone'. Imagine, for example, if Indian Point nuclear power plants suffered a catastrophic failure and forced evacuation of Manhattan? Practically this means costs of nuclear power plants are very high, as you have to over-engineer them relative to other power sources. Natural gas and coal plant accidents are relatively common, for example; similarly oil refineries suffer fires on a regular basis. However, Texas City (site of a major BP disaster in 2005) is not currently a 100-year no-go-zone. Here's a 5-minute video on how that played out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9JY3eT4cdM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9JY3eT4cdM Point being, there's no way to reduce nuclear power upfront costs without also introducing unacceptable risks, and that's a major reason why nuclear isn't going to replace fossil fuels on a global scale (along with the uranium ore to fuel rod to waste pile supply chain issues,decommissioning costs, etc.) There's no catastrophic failure mode for a solar/wind/storage based grid, and that's one of several reasons why nuclear will remain little more than a niche provider.

a9h74j 4y ago
> There's no catastrophic failure mode for a solar/wind/storage based grid Not to start the usual HN debate, but specifically in terms of the word 'catastrophe' being used. ... [Given current lack of storage] if there is lack of wind for two weeks and people are freezing in the UK, that could be a kind of high-severity catastrophe. A weather-system-related wind failure is a kind of common mode failure mechanism in that it can affect many nominally independent generators at once. I agree regional damage from worst-case nuclear could be a different level of severity. Caveats about "well that's why long-distance transmission" granted.
- ajross 4y ago
  > Not to start the usual HN debate Then maybe don't throw up a giant strawman? No one is advocating for an exclusively wind-based power grid, so why pretend they are? Real systems won't have the failure mode you posit. In fact real grids (c.f. the Republic of Texas, or for that matter most of the developing world) are operating today with genuinely terrible reliability without the kind of "high-severity catastrophe" you are analogizing to a nuclear meltdown.

a9h74j 4y ago

Good reporting here, of the kind one can crave for these days. For anyone familiar (or concerned) with saftey-critical work, appears to deserve careful reading. Not necessarily mentioned (I haven't finished reading), but part of the apparent gist-of-the-concern: Challenger accident and normalization of deviance.

BMc2020 4y ago

michael_nielsen 4y ago
You evidently didn't read the article.
- BMc2020 4y ago
  I have, so many times I didn't feel the need to read this particular one. Was there something new?
- BMc2020 4y ago
  Huh, turns out I did and had completely forgotten it. Check my history if you don't believe. 1 point by BMc2020 4 days ago | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: How Safe Are Nuclear Power Plants? And yet my own studies on reactor safety—which include papers co-authored with the late M.I.T. physicist and Nobel laureate Henry Kendall, and several books based on extensive reporting for this magazine—have concluded that nuclear power’s potential contribution to clean energy has been compromised by safety shortcuts taken by the industry, and by lax government regulation of day-to-day safety practices at the plants.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
_joel 4y ago
The irony of saying nuclear propoganda is so repetitive when we literally define 48 hours as (9,192,631,770 * 172800) or 1.5884868e+15 'oscillations' of a caesium 133 atom (133Cs). It's almost as if it means something!

wishawa 4y ago

> federal regulators consistently assured Americans that the risks of a massive accident were “vanishingly small”—even when they knew they had insufficient evidence to prove it Why is the burden of proof on them? Nuclear should be innocent until proven guilty just like any other technology. Once the principle design has been shown to be sound, it should be the job of those opposing it to prove claims of unsafeness.

switchbak 4y ago
Absolutely not. We know what happens in the worst case, so in this regard an abundance of precaution is most certainly appropriate. As to how far you go to ensure safe designs, that's a question, but I don't think it's appropriate to 'assume the best' in this case, given the huge potential downsides. And I'm someone who's pretty supportive of modern and safe nuclear!
sillystuff 4y ago
Disagree with this part: "Nuclear should be innocent until proven guilty..." Fully agree with this part: "...just like any other technology" The assumption of safe until proven dangerous should be flipped wherever it currently prevails. If X wants to add some novel thing into our environment / food supply, the burden should be on X to prove safety, first.
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  We have sufficient evidence from France and Germany that safe reactor designs are safe.
  - Baloo 4y ago
    Aren't France shutting down a large number of plants due to safety issues?
    - BurningFrog 4y ago
      Looked this up, and France is having several nuclear problems at once, including that rivers used for cooling is getting too warm in the summer. Some of it is indeed security concerns in aging reactors. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-power-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...

kens 4y ago

> After the Three Mile Island incident, a Presidential commission, chaired by John Kemeny, the mathematician and president of Dartmouth College, issued a sobering report. As a random historical note that might be interesting to HN, Kemeny was also the co-inventor of the BASIC language.

wrycoder 4y ago
Kemeny ruined Dartmouth College and BASIC was far behind the state of the art in programming languages at the time.
- cowtools 4y ago
  It's irrelevant because the purpose of BASIC is to teach principles of computer programming, not to be a useful language in itself: https://basic256.org/2019/06/27/why-another-basic/ https://basic256.org/2019/06/27/why-another-basic/
  - TMWNN 4y ago
    Indeed. Dartmouth in the 1960s and 1970s, with the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (with a BASIC-driven UI), had * computer terminals everywhere, including libraries, dorms, offices, and even the medical clinic * many classes (not just computer science or math) requiring use of the terminals for various tasks * a widespread culture among students and faculty (again, not just computer science or math) of use of the terminals for work and play (games, email, chat) * more computer terminals at dozens of off-campus locations, including high schools, other universities, and Dartmouth alumni clubs It is not an exaggeration to say that Dartmouth c. 1970 had the world's most widely used and widespread computer network, exceeding anything at MIT, Stanford, or UIUC.
    - wrycoder 4y ago
      Nice network. But Dartmouth BASIC was a primitive language that encouraged unmaintainable spaghetti code. (This was not too bad, if the programs were twenty lines long, I guess.)

bluSCALE4 4y ago

Is anyone else in asshole mode like me where I'd rather see all unsafe plants replaced before breaking new ground? This, let's ignore our ticking time bombs approach doesn't fly with me, lest we forget Fukushima is still a thing.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
I am in this camp. I want a "modern" nuclear design that isn't rooted in what the previous regime considered "safe". I want near 100% fuel consumption so there's no or far far less nuclear waste. LFTR allegedly does this (allegedly can use old solid fuel rod waste too) I want meltdown-proof design inherent to the reactor. LFTR has a self-moderating design and has a plug leading to a pool that separates the fluid fuel so it no longer is fissile. I want is scalable in size. And it has to be economical with solar/wind. LFTR probably has materials problems, but the chinese are giving one a go. We'll see. I don't think nuclear will cost competitive without a new round of approaches/designs. I don't think any current design will cut it, economically, safety in operation, safety in waste reduction/no transport, etc.
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  Even without LFTR, the new liquid metal/salt cooled reactors have a self-moderating design. (LMFR or LMFBR respectively) They could be modified to be multipass reactors too, and already reduce waste a lot. The problem with multipass reactors is that fuel enrichment is the way to explosives... It took a long time to achieve safety with these liquid metal/salt cooled reactors, as Japanese can tell.
pdonis 4y ago
> Fukushima is still a thing There's an easy way to avoid future Fukushimas that has nothing to do with any change in nuclear reactor design: don't site your backup power switchgear in a place that could get inundated with water. (Note that all of the other reactors at the Fukushima site had this--and none of them had any problems after the earthquake and tsunami.) "Ticking time bombs" is not a valid description of any commercial nuclear plant. Building newer, safer designs in the future is great, but even without considering any of those designs, nuclear energy is by far the safest form of energy per unit of energy generated. Imagine if we had been smart in the 1970s and 1980s and started building nuclear reactors everywhere to replace coal and oil. We could be in a position now where no fossil fuels needed to be burned anywhere on the planet. To deny ourselves this because "Fukushima!" is foolish.

BurningFrog 4y ago

What annoys me the most about Fukushima is that 19,747 people died in that event. Mostly by drowning. None in the nuclear accident. And yet that is what is remembered as the big disaster that day.

sofixa 4y ago
And an oil tank fire caused by the same tsunami and earthquake killed more people than the nuclear incident and destroyed a whole city.
wizofaus 4y ago
You also wonder if any sort of cost benefit analysis was done over decisions to mothball nuclear power plants after said event, compared, say, to restricting the building of houses in areas prone to tsunami damage (there's plenty of good reasons we need to stop living so close to shorelines yet it seems as popular as ever).
pvaldes 4y ago
because the nuclear accident... is still a problem... more than a decade later... because... ... it was a nuclear accident While the other problem was closed ten years ago
- jdmg94 4y ago
  In the US they still have people from Hurricane Katrina on FEMA trailers, natural disasters take a long time to recover from which is contrary to public perception that its solved cause its out of the news cycle

RappingBoomer 4y ago

the fossil fuel lobby probably senses a growing acceptance of nuke power among the younger generations... expect to see more like this article

wizofaus 4y ago
Interesting point - we have pretty solid evidence of vested interests funding anything that will help their short/medium term bottom line, surely at least some of that might be big coal/gas funding research that "demonstrates" how unsafe nuclear power is?

hammyhavoc 4y ago

Safer than houses.

deleted 4y ago

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EricE 4y ago

What a sensationalistic piece of trash. It's time to voraciously naming, shame and SHUN publications who insist on selfishly fear mongering to get clicks.

phs318u 4y ago

I keep pointing this out - I'll be more than happy to see nuclear power plants where I live, when the industry is happy to operate in the absence of the Price-Anderson act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear... Until then, NIMBY.