5 ms·

I think this logic is flawed. Oil, coal, gas, hydro, etc inflict casualties gradually and predictably. They are, generally speaking, not capable of the sudden

by EB66 4y ago

I think this logic is flawed. Oil, coal, gas, hydro, etc inflict casualties gradually and predictably. They are, generally speaking, not capable of the sudden region-wide catastrophic disasters that nuclear power is capable of. Those are rare events. The Poisson distribution, with regard to inflicting mass casualties, is completely different for nuclear power. We haven't had a true nuclear catastrophe yet. We came close with Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, but those events were not nearly as bad as they could have been. The number of casualties could have been orders of magnitude higher. In other words, our sample size with nuclear power is small. All it would take is one nuclear catastrophe and the safety stats averaged over the last century suddenly look much different.

samatman 4y ago
This is comprehensively untrue. No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl. Passive safety is a given now. Your emotion-driven conservatism has to be weighed against the real harms caused by other viable baseline power systems. Advocacy against nuclear power is advocacy for fossil fuels, like it or not.
- imtringued 4y ago
  >No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl Fukushima is older than Chernobyl. This type of thinking is how these catastrophes happen. People keep obsolete designs in operation for 50 years or more and basically make any safety gains today pointless.
- EB66 4y ago
  > This is comprehensively untrue... Your emotion-driven conservatism... I think your choice in phrasing speaks more to your emotional state than mine. > No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl. You are discounting the fact that many of the nuclear reactors that remain in operation today were designed decades ago and were built decades ago. Of course newer nuclear technology is safer -- I don't think anyone would ever disagree with that. But we are considering the safety of nuclear power as it exists today. Why would we omit nuclear reactors that are currently in operation today (and will continue to be in operation for quite some time) from the discussion?
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    This comment is more clear. Above, you spoke about nuclear power in the abstract. It's good to separate out the discussion like this. Because nuclear power can mean building new safe reactors, or it can mean keeping really old ones running. > But we are considering the safety of nuclear power as it exists today. Even then, it's not a homogeneous blob of risk. There are different reactor designs, run by authorities of different competence levels, built at varying distances away from cities. There's no substitute for a case by case analysis. I sense a hand-wavy aspect to the argument. I want some harder facts. What percentage of currently live reactors have an equal or greater risk than the Chernobyl plant? Is it 2% or 50%? Such distinctions make a big difference to the tail risk.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  > No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl. Passive safety is a given now. Current reactors are burner reactors. They cannot power the world (there is not enough sufficiently cheap uranium). To power the world, breeder reactors are needed. Breeder reactors will burn the bred isotopes, either Pu isotopes or U-233. These isotopes, when fissioned, produce about half the delayed neutrons of U-235. As a result, reactors burning them are skating closer to the edge of prompt criticality than today's reactors. Chernobyl was a prompt criticality accident. A prompt criticality accident in a fast reactor (any breeder using Pu will be a fast reactor) is potentially much more serious than even Chernobyl.
Manuel_D 4y ago
No, Chernobyl is about as worst- ase-scenario as it gets. Entire pressure vessel exploded, with no secondary containment. It was exposed to atmosphere for days (weeks?) Before being sealed.
- EB66 4y ago
  Chernobyl was very close to being massively worse. At Chernobyl, the melting down core never came into contact with the large pool of cooling water, but it was awfully close. Had it come into contact with all that water, an enormous explosion would have resulted. Some experts say that explosion could have irradiated half of Europe.
  - natmaka 4y ago
    Even the real consequences of the catastrophe are difficult to establish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the_Catastrophe_for_People_and_the_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    > At Chernobyl, the melting down core never came into contact with the large pool of cooling water, but it was awfully close. No, it did not. That water was drained, precisely because of concerns that it would melt down and come into contact with water.
    - EB66 4y ago
      Yes, it did come close. If it wasn't close, as you suggest, then why did a crew of people wade into highly radioactive water -- a probable suicide mission -- to manually operate the valves to drain the water?
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        I answered this in my comment: > That water was drained, precisely because of concerns that it would melt down and come into contact with water. Even if the concrete base under the reactor was breached, the water underneath had been drained. In retrospect this was unnecessary, but it added another layer of precaution. Furthermore, what makes you think a potential explosion after coming into contact with water would be "massively" worse than the original reactor explosion? In case you aren't aware, the RBMK-1000 was a water cooled reactor. The explosion happened because the temperatures inside became so high that the pressure vessel ruptured. By comparison, the contact with the water beneath the reactor hall would not be trapped in a pressure vessel and wouldn't result generate such pressure. What actually produced the most amount of nuclear contamination was the period of time when the fuel rods were exposed to atmosphere and burned. This put large amounts of contaminants - radioactive smoke, essentially - into the atmopshere.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
svedlin 4y ago
"Assuming there are 500 reactors in use in the world, the above CDF estimates mean that, statistically, one core damage incident would be expected to occur somewhere in the world every 40 years for the 2003 European Commission estimated average accident rate or every 100 years for the 2008 Electric Power Research Institute estimated average accident rate." [1] "5 serious accidents in 60 years represents an actual historic global annual risk of 1/12 or 8.3% per annum" [2] "If no cooling system is working to remove the decay heat from a crippled and newly shut down reactor, the decay heat may cause the core of the reactor to reach unsafe temperatures within a few hours or days, depending upon the type of core." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_damage_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_damage_frequency [2] https://silo.tips/download/complexity-implies-unknowable-risk https://silo.tips/download/complexity-implies-unknowable-ris... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat

by EB66 4y ago

samatman 4y ago

This is comprehensively untrue. No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl. Passive safety is a given now. Your emotion-driven conservatism has to be weighed against the real harms caused by other viable baseline power systems. Advocacy against nuclear power is advocacy for fossil fuels, like it or not.

imtringued 4y ago
>No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl Fukushima is older than Chernobyl. This type of thinking is how these catastrophes happen. People keep obsolete designs in operation for 50 years or more and basically make any safety gains today pointless.
EB66 4y ago
> This is comprehensively untrue... Your emotion-driven conservatism... I think your choice in phrasing speaks more to your emotional state than mine. > No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl. You are discounting the fact that many of the nuclear reactors that remain in operation today were designed decades ago and were built decades ago. Of course newer nuclear technology is safer -- I don't think anyone would ever disagree with that. But we are considering the safety of nuclear power as it exists today. Why would we omit nuclear reactors that are currently in operation today (and will continue to be in operation for quite some time) from the discussion?
- hackerlight 4y ago
  This comment is more clear. Above, you spoke about nuclear power in the abstract. It's good to separate out the discussion like this. Because nuclear power can mean building new safe reactors, or it can mean keeping really old ones running. > But we are considering the safety of nuclear power as it exists today. Even then, it's not a homogeneous blob of risk. There are different reactor designs, run by authorities of different competence levels, built at varying distances away from cities. There's no substitute for a case by case analysis. I sense a hand-wavy aspect to the argument. I want some harder facts. What percentage of currently live reactors have an equal or greater risk than the Chernobyl plant? Is it 2% or 50%? Such distinctions make a big difference to the tail risk.
pfdietz 4y ago
> No nuclear plant built since Chernobyl will have an incident as bad as Chernobyl. Passive safety is a given now. Current reactors are burner reactors. They cannot power the world (there is not enough sufficiently cheap uranium). To power the world, breeder reactors are needed. Breeder reactors will burn the bred isotopes, either Pu isotopes or U-233. These isotopes, when fissioned, produce about half the delayed neutrons of U-235. As a result, reactors burning them are skating closer to the edge of prompt criticality than today's reactors. Chernobyl was a prompt criticality accident. A prompt criticality accident in a fast reactor (any breeder using Pu will be a fast reactor) is potentially much more serious than even Chernobyl.

Manuel_D 4y ago

No, Chernobyl is about as worst- ase-scenario as it gets. Entire pressure vessel exploded, with no secondary containment. It was exposed to atmosphere for days (weeks?) Before being sealed.

EB66 4y ago
Chernobyl was very close to being massively worse. At Chernobyl, the melting down core never came into contact with the large pool of cooling water, but it was awfully close. Had it come into contact with all that water, an enormous explosion would have resulted. Some experts say that explosion could have irradiated half of Europe.
- natmaka 4y ago
  Even the real consequences of the catastrophe are difficult to establish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the_Catastrophe_for_People_and_the_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  > At Chernobyl, the melting down core never came into contact with the large pool of cooling water, but it was awfully close. No, it did not. That water was drained, precisely because of concerns that it would melt down and come into contact with water.
  - EB66 4y ago
    Yes, it did come close. If it wasn't close, as you suggest, then why did a crew of people wade into highly radioactive water -- a probable suicide mission -- to manually operate the valves to drain the water?
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      I answered this in my comment: > That water was drained, precisely because of concerns that it would melt down and come into contact with water. Even if the concrete base under the reactor was breached, the water underneath had been drained. In retrospect this was unnecessary, but it added another layer of precaution. Furthermore, what makes you think a potential explosion after coming into contact with water would be "massively" worse than the original reactor explosion? In case you aren't aware, the RBMK-1000 was a water cooled reactor. The explosion happened because the temperatures inside became so high that the pressure vessel ruptured. By comparison, the contact with the water beneath the reactor hall would not be trapped in a pressure vessel and wouldn't result generate such pressure. What actually produced the most amount of nuclear contamination was the period of time when the fuel rods were exposed to atmosphere and burned. This put large amounts of contaminants - radioactive smoke, essentially - into the atmopshere.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

svedlin 4y ago

"Assuming there are 500 reactors in use in the world, the above CDF estimates mean that, statistically, one core damage incident would be expected to occur somewhere in the world every 40 years for the 2003 European Commission estimated average accident rate or every 100 years for the 2008 Electric Power Research Institute estimated average accident rate." [1] "5 serious accidents in 60 years represents an actual historic global annual risk of 1/12 or 8.3% per annum" [2] "If no cooling system is working to remove the decay heat from a crippled and newly shut down reactor, the decay heat may cause the core of the reactor to reach unsafe temperatures within a few hours or days, depending upon the type of core." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_damage_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_damage_frequency [2] https://silo.tips/download/complexity-implies-unknowable-risk https://silo.tips/download/complexity-implies-unknowable-ris... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat