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It's still a testament to how safe nuclear power plants really are. - Bad operators? Check - Earthquake? Check - Tsunami? Check ... - "There were no deaths

It's still a testament to how safe nuclear power plants really are. - Bad operators? Check - Earthquake? Check - Tsunami? Check ... - "There were no deaths from radiation exposure in the immediate aftermath of the incident, though there were a number of (around 1600 non-radiation related) deaths during the evacuation of the nearby population" Wikipedia

BurningFrog 4y ago
Biggest Earthquake in known history (1000+ years) even!
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  Nah, not even the biggest in the past 20 years (Sumatra was larger).
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    Sorry, I meant to say Japanese history. It's the 4th biggest recorded on the Richter scale.
BurningFrog 4y ago
There were maybe 1600 drowning deaths in the area from the tsunami. What would evacuation deaths even be?
- sampo 4y ago
  > What would evacuation deaths even be? I think some deaths occurred when evacuating hospital patients.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    1600 people is an enormous number of deaths. It would have been reported. I've followed Fukushima news since it happened, and never heard of this before.
    - LorenPechtel 4y ago
      1,600 seems a little high, my memory was about half of that. 100% due to the evacuation, not the reactor. It's just politically inconvenient deaths tend to get labeled something else, often the underlying condition that was exacerbated by whatever the issue da jour is. I've never seen a breakdown of exactly what caused the evacuation deaths but when you go shipping a bunch of frail patients around in a total mess you should *expect* deaths.
- mh- 4y ago
  Deaths that wouldn't have occurred had a mass evacuation not taken place. Here's a paper analyzing the evacuation-related deaths from Hurricane Rita. > A majority of the deaths (90/108 or 83.3%) were related to the mass evacuation process. Of these deaths, 10% were directly related to hyperthermia in motor vehicles. The combination of traffic gridlock and high temperatures, limitation of air conditioning to reduce fuel consumption, reduction of oral intake to decrease restroom visits, and conservation of limited supplies is suspected. https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(16)51609-2/fulltext https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(16)51609-2/f... (Note: I've limited the snippet here, it's worth reading in context from the abstract.)
duxup 4y ago
I recall an engineer writing that Fukushima did a lot to prove that the idea of a run away meltdown where the core melts into a super heated blob that escapes the facility and melts its way into the earth was even more unlikely than they had thought. If it couldn't happen at a poorly operated / out dated facility the odds must be pretty low.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  People all over this thread making the enormously wrong point that nuclear is ~safe because Fukushima and Chernobyl weren't that bad... There is absolutely no indication that either one was the worst case and it's a failure of imagination to rely on what happened at either to assess the 'real' risk of nuclear. As just one example -- the pools at Chernobyl below the reactor that the engineers had to manually open after the meltdown were sufficient to cause a massive steam explosion. Sure, some additional fissile material would've been spread by that explosion which would be bad -- but the real risk is whether a few hundred ton equivalent explosion in reactor 4 would have been enough to destroy the immediately adjacent reactor 3 building and the reactor 1/2 building as well. There were 13GW of thermal energy in the complex and between design deficiencies and operator errors, 1/4 of that melted down and resulted in a 1,000 sq mi exclusion zone. It's absurd to think that was as bad as it could get.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > There is absolutely no indication that either one was the worst case You're trying to prove a negative using Chernobyl (a 50-year old design) as some kind of proof. Even with Chernobyl only 100 deaths are directly attributed to the disaster and there hasn't been any statistically observable rise in effects like cancer since. So, the greatest nuclear power plant disasters in human history caused ... fewer deaths than a single coal power plant in a big city. So yes. We will use them as examples of how safe nuclear power actually is.
    - mikeyouse 4y ago
      This is like saying SARS1 was as bad as a modern pandemic could be... of course it's not. It was the worst we'd seen to that point but with some bad luck, it could be substantially worse. If you assume that the worst thing that has happened is the worst thing that could happen, you're going to be in for a very bad time. This isn't remotely to say that Nuclear is 'bad' or that we shouldn't build new plants, just that we should be clear-eyed about the actual tail risks while designing them.

BurningFrog 4y ago

Biggest Earthquake in known history (1000+ years) even!

mikeyouse 4y ago
Nah, not even the biggest in the past 20 years (Sumatra was larger).
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  Sorry, I meant to say Japanese history. It's the 4th biggest recorded on the Richter scale.

BurningFrog 4y ago

There were maybe 1600 drowning deaths in the area from the tsunami. What would evacuation deaths even be?

sampo 4y ago
> What would evacuation deaths even be? I think some deaths occurred when evacuating hospital patients.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  1600 people is an enormous number of deaths. It would have been reported. I've followed Fukushima news since it happened, and never heard of this before.
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    1,600 seems a little high, my memory was about half of that. 100% due to the evacuation, not the reactor. It's just politically inconvenient deaths tend to get labeled something else, often the underlying condition that was exacerbated by whatever the issue da jour is. I've never seen a breakdown of exactly what caused the evacuation deaths but when you go shipping a bunch of frail patients around in a total mess you should *expect* deaths.
mh- 4y ago
Deaths that wouldn't have occurred had a mass evacuation not taken place. Here's a paper analyzing the evacuation-related deaths from Hurricane Rita. > A majority of the deaths (90/108 or 83.3%) were related to the mass evacuation process. Of these deaths, 10% were directly related to hyperthermia in motor vehicles. The combination of traffic gridlock and high temperatures, limitation of air conditioning to reduce fuel consumption, reduction of oral intake to decrease restroom visits, and conservation of limited supplies is suspected. https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(16)51609-2/fulltext https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(16)51609-2/f... (Note: I've limited the snippet here, it's worth reading in context from the abstract.)

duxup 4y ago

I recall an engineer writing that Fukushima did a lot to prove that the idea of a run away meltdown where the core melts into a super heated blob that escapes the facility and melts its way into the earth was even more unlikely than they had thought. If it couldn't happen at a poorly operated / out dated facility the odds must be pretty low.

mikeyouse 4y ago
People all over this thread making the enormously wrong point that nuclear is ~safe because Fukushima and Chernobyl weren't that bad... There is absolutely no indication that either one was the worst case and it's a failure of imagination to rely on what happened at either to assess the 'real' risk of nuclear. As just one example -- the pools at Chernobyl below the reactor that the engineers had to manually open after the meltdown were sufficient to cause a massive steam explosion. Sure, some additional fissile material would've been spread by that explosion which would be bad -- but the real risk is whether a few hundred ton equivalent explosion in reactor 4 would have been enough to destroy the immediately adjacent reactor 3 building and the reactor 1/2 building as well. There were 13GW of thermal energy in the complex and between design deficiencies and operator errors, 1/4 of that melted down and resulted in a 1,000 sq mi exclusion zone. It's absurd to think that was as bad as it could get.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > There is absolutely no indication that either one was the worst case You're trying to prove a negative using Chernobyl (a 50-year old design) as some kind of proof. Even with Chernobyl only 100 deaths are directly attributed to the disaster and there hasn't been any statistically observable rise in effects like cancer since. So, the greatest nuclear power plant disasters in human history caused ... fewer deaths than a single coal power plant in a big city. So yes. We will use them as examples of how safe nuclear power actually is.
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    This is like saying SARS1 was as bad as a modern pandemic could be... of course it's not. It was the worst we'd seen to that point but with some bad luck, it could be substantially worse. If you assume that the worst thing that has happened is the worst thing that could happen, you're going to be in for a very bad time. This isn't remotely to say that Nuclear is 'bad' or that we shouldn't build new plants, just that we should be clear-eyed about the actual tail risks while designing them.