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> Whatever your thoughts are on the incident, one thing is clear; it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so. this is the whole thing about

by zzzeek 4y ago

> Whatever your thoughts are on the incident, one thing is clear; it was absolutely preventable, and they had the means to do so. this is the whole thing about nuclear power. There's always plenty of data on how, from a technical standpoint, nuclear energy can be generated completely safely. There's always the hindsight observations how, none of this had to happen. But implementing technical solutions requires institutional capabilities to pull it off. Case in point if you google for "Fukushima Was Preventable" you get a ton of hits that refer to well regarded studies, interviews, and journalism that refers to the ways in which TEPCO failed to plan and respond appropriately to the disaster. But if you google for "Fukushima Was Not Preventable" then you get this: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2022-06-18/fukushima-nuclear-accident-could-not-have-been-prevented-6387182.html https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2022-06-18/fuk... just this year, Japan's legal system still claiming it was not preventable. It's easy to read between the lines on that, as the reason they decided this is because they are avoiding paying out damages to thousands of people harmed by this negligence. That is, they are lying. From this, I draw the same conclusion I always have about nuclear power. Sure it can be done safely. But who is actually willing to do that enormous, massive effort, without cutting corners, covering up problems, acting negligently, and then ten years later just continuing to lie about it? Private companies? no way. Governments? we would hope, but wow, nuclear is really , really expensive and complicated to get right, and often not sufficient as practiced by mere human instutitions.

irchans 4y ago
I agree with you. (I was a nuclear engineer for a few years.) The problem seems to be human institutions. There always seems to be corruption and stupidity. Chernobyl was pretty stupid. Bad reactor design and rather bad operator decisions. Part of the Fukushima problem was an insufficient sea wall. They did get unlucky with a 7.4 magnitude quake. It was stupid to put the back up generators in the basement where they were flooded. There is a summary of some of the human errors and corruption here https://escholarship.org/uc/item/30x14946 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/30x14946 Three mile island was largely operator error. There also appeared to be corruption during the clean up. Private companies are always trying to cut costs. Government organizations are often subverted by the industry. America and Western Europe have a fairly decent nuclear safety record. I think it is just plain difficult to avoid corruption for any regulatory organization. The potential for a serious nuclear incident involving 100,000+ deaths exists. Both Chernobyl and Three mile island could have been much worse. If things had been worse, there was a potential for hundreds of square miles to be contaminated for several decades. It is very difficult to design a nuclear reactor the can survive operator error and government corruption. There is also the potential for terrorist attacks on reactors. On the other hand, we do seem to have a very big CO2 problem and maybe we need to take the nuclear risk. As far as I can tell, we cannot rely on solar and wind for more than 70 or 80 percent of our energy needs. Maybe geothermal or wave power combined with solar and wind could be used to eliminate the need for fission nuclear power.
- killjoywashere 4y ago
  Agree. I majored in physics with the plan of working on reactor plants. Not how the cards played out, but I still got the degree and have seen reactor operations up close for years. My general position is that even if many more people die installing rooftop solar and wind turbines, just falling off roofs and ladders, it's a better plan, politically, than nuclear. Not that nuclear can't be done safely, but that even done safely, the optics of single-point failures, which will happen, are so bad that nuclear becomes political loser. Just build more wind and solar and the distribution infrastructure to move it around.
  - zzzeek 4y ago
    the people who were just denied damages from a court in Japan aren't "optics". They are real people, harmed, denied justice. Due to nuclear being just too big a fish to catch for an institution like Japans' nuclear industry and too big to admit it by their judicial branch.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    So your argument is basically, humanity is to stupid for nuclear. That's pretty depressing.
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      Be depressed if that is what it takes for the message to penetrate.
- nradov 4y ago
  The available amount of economically viable geothermal and wave power available in the US is pretty limited. Those sources should certainly be part of the mix, but they aren't scalable and won't replace the long-term need for fission power to deliver the base load.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  The "very big CO2" problem is another argument against nukes: you displace much more CO2, and notably sooner, by spending the money building out renewables instead. Furthermore, the near-zero opex for renewables frees up more money to build out more renewables and eventually, when needed, storage.
panick21_ 4y ago
> But implementing technical solutions requires institutional capabilities to pull it off. And history shows that pretty much every nation that has tried it, including the Soviet Union did it with high safety. Can you name a single nation that has tried to use nuclear power on the large scale and has failed with a large number of deaths? So it really is like, if you just do it, its most likely the safest thing you can do.
- zzzeek 4y ago
  always that mono-metric of "deaths" and not, "350,000 people had to leave their homes and 37 million acres of land wont be inhabitable for 3000-20000 years" (actual stats on chernobyl)
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Again most of that is political. People living in the exclusion don't have significantly higher rates of cancer. And again, this is soviet union reactor technology that doesn't apply anyway. Instead of moving those people investing even 10% that amount of money in new hospitals, trains and bike lanes (or name X other things) would have saved far more people. So if you want to be really hard core you could say, right, we should never built that type of reactor again. But we have never done so in the West anyway so its really none issue in any rational discussion about energy policy.
midoridensha 4y ago
This is true, but the problem is that you need electricity from somewhere, and the only viable alternative to nuclear is burning coal. How much damage and death is caused by negligent nuclear vs. coal?

by zzzeek 4y ago

irchans 4y ago

I agree with you. (I was a nuclear engineer for a few years.) The problem seems to be human institutions. There always seems to be corruption and stupidity. Chernobyl was pretty stupid. Bad reactor design and rather bad operator decisions. Part of the Fukushima problem was an insufficient sea wall. They did get unlucky with a 7.4 magnitude quake. It was stupid to put the back up generators in the basement where they were flooded. There is a summary of some of the human errors and corruption here https://escholarship.org/uc/item/30x14946 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/30x14946 Three mile island was largely operator error. There also appeared to be corruption during the clean up. Private companies are always trying to cut costs. Government organizations are often subverted by the industry. America and Western Europe have a fairly decent nuclear safety record. I think it is just plain difficult to avoid corruption for any regulatory organization. The potential for a serious nuclear incident involving 100,000+ deaths exists. Both Chernobyl and Three mile island could have been much worse. If things had been worse, there was a potential for hundreds of square miles to be contaminated for several decades. It is very difficult to design a nuclear reactor the can survive operator error and government corruption. There is also the potential for terrorist attacks on reactors. On the other hand, we do seem to have a very big CO2 problem and maybe we need to take the nuclear risk. As far as I can tell, we cannot rely on solar and wind for more than 70 or 80 percent of our energy needs. Maybe geothermal or wave power combined with solar and wind could be used to eliminate the need for fission nuclear power.

killjoywashere 4y ago
Agree. I majored in physics with the plan of working on reactor plants. Not how the cards played out, but I still got the degree and have seen reactor operations up close for years. My general position is that even if many more people die installing rooftop solar and wind turbines, just falling off roofs and ladders, it's a better plan, politically, than nuclear. Not that nuclear can't be done safely, but that even done safely, the optics of single-point failures, which will happen, are so bad that nuclear becomes political loser. Just build more wind and solar and the distribution infrastructure to move it around.
- zzzeek 4y ago
  the people who were just denied damages from a court in Japan aren't "optics". They are real people, harmed, denied justice. Due to nuclear being just too big a fish to catch for an institution like Japans' nuclear industry and too big to admit it by their judicial branch.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  So your argument is basically, humanity is to stupid for nuclear. That's pretty depressing.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    Be depressed if that is what it takes for the message to penetrate.
nradov 4y ago
The available amount of economically viable geothermal and wave power available in the US is pretty limited. Those sources should certainly be part of the mix, but they aren't scalable and won't replace the long-term need for fission power to deliver the base load.
moloch-hai 4y ago
The "very big CO2" problem is another argument against nukes: you displace much more CO2, and notably sooner, by spending the money building out renewables instead. Furthermore, the near-zero opex for renewables frees up more money to build out more renewables and eventually, when needed, storage.

panick21_ 4y ago

> But implementing technical solutions requires institutional capabilities to pull it off. And history shows that pretty much every nation that has tried it, including the Soviet Union did it with high safety. Can you name a single nation that has tried to use nuclear power on the large scale and has failed with a large number of deaths? So it really is like, if you just do it, its most likely the safest thing you can do.

zzzeek 4y ago
always that mono-metric of "deaths" and not, "350,000 people had to leave their homes and 37 million acres of land wont be inhabitable for 3000-20000 years" (actual stats on chernobyl)
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Again most of that is political. People living in the exclusion don't have significantly higher rates of cancer. And again, this is soviet union reactor technology that doesn't apply anyway. Instead of moving those people investing even 10% that amount of money in new hospitals, trains and bike lanes (or name X other things) would have saved far more people. So if you want to be really hard core you could say, right, we should never built that type of reactor again. But we have never done so in the West anyway so its really none issue in any rational discussion about energy policy.

midoridensha 4y ago

This is true, but the problem is that you need electricity from somewhere, and the only viable alternative to nuclear is burning coal. How much damage and death is caused by negligent nuclear vs. coal?