8 ms·

Air cooled nuclear reactors - what could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot as it turns out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/

Air cooled nuclear reactors - what could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot as it turns out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

karencarits 4y ago
Not to downplay the significance of this disaster, but this is one of the worst nuclear accidents we know - yet "It is estimated that the radiation leak may have caused 240 additional cancer cases, with 100 to 240 of these being fatal". Not all dams are used for power, of course, but the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam[0] is estimated to have killed 171 000 I guess all infrastructure implies some degree of risk to life and health [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
- arethuza 4y ago
  Yes - I've got the book "Atomic Accidents" and it starts with a description of a disaster at a Russian hydro plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano-Shushenskaya_power_station_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano-Shushenskaya_power_stat...
- yabones 4y ago
  I think a big part of what makes people so afraid of radiation is how easy it is to detect. Imagine if you had a geiger counter that detected Dioxin, Benzine, or PFAS contamination? It would be going off pretty much constantly. You can detect radioactive materials with a cheap detector, where you need an entire lab to find regular poisons, which doesn't help with our lack of ability to assess risk. For example, people side-eye me when I tell them that I have a collection of Uranium glass sitting on a shelf in my house. They assess that risk to be much worse than say, owning Teflon cookware. It's not hyperbole to say that that other forms of pollution kill more people every day than nuclear radiation has in the entire history of atomic power production. But most people don't have the same resistance to an oil refinery or steel factory that they do to a nuclear power station.
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    It is not easy to detect UNLESS you have a geiger counter. Those Russian soldiers dug trenches around Tchernobyl blissfully unawhere of any problems. They carried the dirt into the dwellings and labs where people still have to work, causing ongoing problems. If you don't decontaminate and check everything, then any radioactive dirt that gets stuck on you or your equipment can do its damage for a long time. Worse is when you somehow ingest it and it stays inside. Does happen.
    - littlestymaar 4y ago
      Except, of course, that the story about the Russian soldiers in Chornobyl was completely made up. > any radioactive dirt that gets stuck on you or your equipment can do its damage for a long time If it's outside of your body ,at the level that remains after 3 decades in Chornobyl, it's completely harmless. It starts causing problem if you ingest it, *and your body metabolizes it* (which is the big problem with iodine, but radioactive iodine has a very short half life and is completely gone now). And even in that scenario, you'll suffer from a cancer many years after, that's bad but that's also very far from the made up stories about soldiers' acute irradiation).
      - amiga-workbench 4y ago
        > Except, of course, that the story about the Russian soldiers in Chornobyl was completely made up. There are satellite photos of trenches dug around the red forest where Russian soldiers had deployed?
        littlestymaar 4y ago
        The made up story was talking about those soldiers getting radiation sickness (which requires radiation levels millions time higher than the one you'd find there). If the Russian soldiers get problems from their trench digging endeavor, it won't be seen before many years, when a small percentage of them starts getting cancer. (needless to say, the increases mortality from the said cancers will be negligible compared to the mortality induced by being invading soldiers in Ukraine).
- Retric 4y ago
  In general people build dams to #1 store water, #2 save lives, and only a distant 3rd generate power. Most of the 62 dams that collapsed in that hurricane where not hydroelectric dams. And it’s not clear the existence of these dams played that significant role in the death total considering China’s history with even more devastating floods.
- maria2 4y ago
  But the nuclear power plant has the potential to make large swaths of land uninhabitable for thousands of years. There’s clearly a difference.
  - nebopolis 4y ago
    Dams have the side effect of making huge swaths of land uninhabitable automatically as soon as they start filling. From the Three Gorges Dam > China relocated 1.24 million residents (ending with Gaoyang in Hubei Province) as 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages either flooded or were partially flooded by the reservoir
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Planned and managed operational characteristics are not sudden-onset, unanticipated, and highly-disruptive catastrophes. They're fully-anticipated side-effects. Your comment really doesn't speak to the nature of the phenomenon.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - maria2 4y ago
      Dams do not make land uninhabitable. Dams use land for a productive purpose. Do railroads make land uninhabitable? I would say that land with railroad tracks should still be considered habitable, even though you'd die should you choose to live on the railroad tracks. The land itself is still habitable, you'd just need to remove the dam to live there. Just as you might need to remove the railroad tracks.
  - littlestymaar 4y ago
    The «inhabitable for thousands of years» is a myth. Do you know how many people live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki today? Poeple vastly overestimate the dangerous of this stuff after a few years. Fukushima and Prypiat are probably safer to live than the average Asian city center due to air pollution, or even the Midwest due to pesticide exposure…
mannykannot 4y ago
Fortunately, the director of Britain's Atomic Energy Research Establishment, John Cockcroft, insisted on filters being retrofitted to the cooling air exhaust stacks (not specifically out of concerns for a fire.) This expensive and time-consuming addendum was ridiculed as "Cockcroft's Folly" until the fire, when they captured ~95% of the discharge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cockcroft#Cockcroft's_Folly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cockcroft#Cockcroft's_Fol...
- arethuza 4y ago
  I wondered for years what the big towers were for and what the odd looking bits on top were - was amazed to find out that they were chimneys and the bits on top were filters!
- Arrath 4y ago
  I do hope he spent the rest of his life on a big "I told you so" tour to anyone who had uttered 'Cockcroft's Folly' before the accident.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
kergonath 4y ago
Not ideal in terms of radionuclide release. Also not a great coolant due to the ridiculously small heat capacity. Also, these reactors had no other purpose than producing plutonium for weapons and the design is completely useless for anything else.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Beats river cooled reactors..
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Rivers can and do dry up or reduce significantly in flow.
  - qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
    I ment the first sovjet reactor, were they literally diverted a river through the reactor core. Polluting all villages and a sea down stream forever.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Oh that's really ugly, do you know which reactor this was?
      - dTal 4y ago
        They are referring to Mayak, and however ugly you're picturing, it's probably worse: a Chernobyl-level radiological release, but on deliberate as operational procedure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak
        jacquesm 4y ago
        Holy crap, I never knew about this. Wow. That's a level of irresponsibility that I did not think would exist even in that part of the world. Incredible.
    - arethuza 4y ago
      I think the first US plutonium producing reactors at Hanford also used direct cooling by river water.
yodelshady 4y ago
To add context, the described plant was a weapons programme that predates any civilian nuclear energy. In fact it also predates the hydrogen bomb, so that war planners vastly overestimated the amount of plutonium needed.

Air cooled nuclear reactors - what could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot as it turns out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

karencarits 4y ago

Not to downplay the significance of this disaster, but this is one of the worst nuclear accidents we know - yet "It is estimated that the radiation leak may have caused 240 additional cancer cases, with 100 to 240 of these being fatal". Not all dams are used for power, of course, but the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam[0] is estimated to have killed 171 000 I guess all infrastructure implies some degree of risk to life and health [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

arethuza 4y ago
Yes - I've got the book "Atomic Accidents" and it starts with a description of a disaster at a Russian hydro plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano-Shushenskaya_power_station_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayano-Shushenskaya_power_stat...
yabones 4y ago
I think a big part of what makes people so afraid of radiation is how easy it is to detect. Imagine if you had a geiger counter that detected Dioxin, Benzine, or PFAS contamination? It would be going off pretty much constantly. You can detect radioactive materials with a cheap detector, where you need an entire lab to find regular poisons, which doesn't help with our lack of ability to assess risk. For example, people side-eye me when I tell them that I have a collection of Uranium glass sitting on a shelf in my house. They assess that risk to be much worse than say, owning Teflon cookware. It's not hyperbole to say that that other forms of pollution kill more people every day than nuclear radiation has in the entire history of atomic power production. But most people don't have the same resistance to an oil refinery or steel factory that they do to a nuclear power station.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  It is not easy to detect UNLESS you have a geiger counter. Those Russian soldiers dug trenches around Tchernobyl blissfully unawhere of any problems. They carried the dirt into the dwellings and labs where people still have to work, causing ongoing problems. If you don't decontaminate and check everything, then any radioactive dirt that gets stuck on you or your equipment can do its damage for a long time. Worse is when you somehow ingest it and it stays inside. Does happen.
  - littlestymaar 4y ago
    Except, of course, that the story about the Russian soldiers in Chornobyl was completely made up. > any radioactive dirt that gets stuck on you or your equipment can do its damage for a long time If it's outside of your body ,at the level that remains after 3 decades in Chornobyl, it's completely harmless. It starts causing problem if you ingest it, *and your body metabolizes it* (which is the big problem with iodine, but radioactive iodine has a very short half life and is completely gone now). And even in that scenario, you'll suffer from a cancer many years after, that's bad but that's also very far from the made up stories about soldiers' acute irradiation).
    - amiga-workbench 4y ago
      > Except, of course, that the story about the Russian soldiers in Chornobyl was completely made up. There are satellite photos of trenches dug around the red forest where Russian soldiers had deployed?
      - littlestymaar 4y ago
        The made up story was talking about those soldiers getting radiation sickness (which requires radiation levels millions time higher than the one you'd find there). If the Russian soldiers get problems from their trench digging endeavor, it won't be seen before many years, when a small percentage of them starts getting cancer. (needless to say, the increases mortality from the said cancers will be negligible compared to the mortality induced by being invading soldiers in Ukraine).
Retric 4y ago
In general people build dams to #1 store water, #2 save lives, and only a distant 3rd generate power. Most of the 62 dams that collapsed in that hurricane where not hydroelectric dams. And it’s not clear the existence of these dams played that significant role in the death total considering China’s history with even more devastating floods.
maria2 4y ago
But the nuclear power plant has the potential to make large swaths of land uninhabitable for thousands of years. There’s clearly a difference.
- nebopolis 4y ago
  Dams have the side effect of making huge swaths of land uninhabitable automatically as soon as they start filling. From the Three Gorges Dam > China relocated 1.24 million residents (ending with Gaoyang in Hubei Province) as 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages either flooded or were partially flooded by the reservoir
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Planned and managed operational characteristics are not sudden-onset, unanticipated, and highly-disruptive catastrophes. They're fully-anticipated side-effects. Your comment really doesn't speak to the nature of the phenomenon.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - maria2 4y ago
    Dams do not make land uninhabitable. Dams use land for a productive purpose. Do railroads make land uninhabitable? I would say that land with railroad tracks should still be considered habitable, even though you'd die should you choose to live on the railroad tracks. The land itself is still habitable, you'd just need to remove the dam to live there. Just as you might need to remove the railroad tracks.
- littlestymaar 4y ago
  The «inhabitable for thousands of years» is a myth. Do you know how many people live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki today? Poeple vastly overestimate the dangerous of this stuff after a few years. Fukushima and Prypiat are probably safer to live than the average Asian city center due to air pollution, or even the Midwest due to pesticide exposure…

mannykannot 4y ago

Fortunately, the director of Britain's Atomic Energy Research Establishment, John Cockcroft, insisted on filters being retrofitted to the cooling air exhaust stacks (not specifically out of concerns for a fire.) This expensive and time-consuming addendum was ridiculed as "Cockcroft's Folly" until the fire, when they captured ~95% of the discharge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cockcroft#Cockcroft's_Folly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cockcroft#Cockcroft's_Fol...

arethuza 4y ago
I wondered for years what the big towers were for and what the odd looking bits on top were - was amazed to find out that they were chimneys and the bits on top were filters!
Arrath 4y ago
I do hope he spent the rest of his life on a big "I told you so" tour to anyone who had uttered 'Cockcroft's Folly' before the accident.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

kergonath 4y ago

Not ideal in terms of radionuclide release. Also not a great coolant due to the ridiculously small heat capacity. Also, these reactors had no other purpose than producing plutonium for weapons and the design is completely useless for anything else.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

Beats river cooled reactors..

jacquesm 4y ago
Rivers can and do dry up or reduce significantly in flow.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  I ment the first sovjet reactor, were they literally diverted a river through the reactor core. Polluting all villages and a sea down stream forever.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Oh that's really ugly, do you know which reactor this was?
    - dTal 4y ago
      They are referring to Mayak, and however ugly you're picturing, it's probably worse: a Chernobyl-level radiological release, but on deliberate as operational procedure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        Holy crap, I never knew about this. Wow. That's a level of irresponsibility that I did not think would exist even in that part of the world. Incredible.
  - arethuza 4y ago
    I think the first US plutonium producing reactors at Hanford also used direct cooling by river water.

yodelshady 4y ago

To add context, the described plant was a weapons programme that predates any civilian nuclear energy. In fact it also predates the hydrogen bomb, so that war planners vastly overestimated the amount of plutonium needed.