13 ms·

The Windscale Fire: Britain's 'Chernobyl' (2019)

58 points by myth_drannon 3y ago

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
https://archive.ph/aEJxE https://archive.ph/aEJxE
ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
The event was not an isolated incident; there had been a series of radioactive discharges from the piles in the years leading up to the accident. In the spring of 1957, only months before the fire, there was a leak of radioactive material in which strontium-90 isotopes were released into the environment. Like the later fire, this incident was also covered up by the British government. Later studies on the release of radioactive material due to the Windscale fire revealed that much of the contamination had resulted from such radiation leaks before the fire.
- DoneWithAllThat 3y ago
  This is a literal copy/paste from the Wikipedia article, word for word.
Gordonjcp 3y ago
It would have been a lot worse without "Cockcroft's Folly" - massive filters built on top of the "chimneys" that caught radioactive crud coming up the stack. These reactors weren't build for nuclear power or anything, they were built to create the right kind of nuclear materials for weapons. They were essentially a couple of bloody great big nuclear bonfires! He also along with Ernest Walton developed the Cockcroft-Walton multiplier, which is a clever arrangement of capacitors and diodes that produce a very high voltage from an AC source. Initially these were used in "atom smashing" cyclotrons, but came to be used in every CRT television you've ever seen.
- Mindwipe 3y ago
  Indeed, people should always bear in mind Windscale was a nuclear weapons facility hidden inside a power plant than a genuine attempt at a power station.
  - Maakuth 3y ago
    From what I've read, I don't think there was any sort of power plant around even for pretense.
    - ianburrell 3y ago
      I think the worlds first commercial nuclear reactors had just started operating at the time of the accident. But they were separate and built later.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  There is a somewhat similar technology for LWRs: systems that filter soluble fission products (including iodine in second generation systems) from steam so the steam can be vented from the containment structure in an accident. These would have been very useful at Fukushima. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1224/ML12248A021.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1224/ML12248A021.pdf The Cockcroft-Walton scheme was not for cyclotrons, but rather for a simple linear potential drop accelerator. Cyclotrons build up the energy of particles over many iterations, so they don't need that high a voltage.
- dang 3y ago
  There's a good article about that which was discussed here: Windscale Piles: Cockcroft's Follies avoided nuclear disaster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558045 - Nov 2014 (15 comments)
itronitron 3y ago
After reading The Greenpeace Book of the Nuclear Age, which chronicles all major nuclear incidents (up to the 1990's I think) I had two key takeaways. There are far more missing nuclear submarines than I would have ever expected, and Britain does not have the right cultural mindset for dealing with nuclear safety. Apologies if that offends anyone.
- badcppdev 3y ago
  Follow up question. Can you name a country that does have a good cultural mindset for nuclear safety? Years ago I used to naively assume the Japanese were very safety conscious and then I read details post-Fukushima that made me realise that the corporate managerial mindset rules there as well.
  - willyt 3y ago
    I've come to think that France might have a good culture in this respect. No major train crashes for years; there's never been a serious accident on the TGV. They have nuclear reactors all over the place and they seem to have managed to operate them safely. Airbus by all accounts seems to have a good safety culture. Maybe it's because of the 'fraternité' in 'liberté égalité fraternité; they have very strong culture of public solidarity and very low income inequality compared to say Britain or the US. And maybe that's why it doesn't cost a fortune to build high speed rail there as well; because there is a moral element to it that means you don't rip off your fellow countrymen.
    - pookha 3y ago
      France standardized all of their reactors. You could swap components in and out of any number of their nuclear reactors. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-the-nuclear-fuel-cycle-what-can-oui-learn https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t... That's not how most other countries handled their nuclear power architecture and I think it's one of the main reasons why France has had major success with no issues. There's nothing flashy about how their nuclear reactors operate but they're very easy to staff and maintain long-term.
equalsione 3y ago
Revisiting the 1957 Windscale Nuclear Accident using Atmospheric Reanalysis data - The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) https://www.ichec.ie/news/revisiting-1957-windscale-nuclear-accident-using-atmospheric-reanalysis-data https://www.ichec.ie/news/revisiting-1957-windscale-nuclear-...
cduzz 3y ago
There's a great documentary about this on youtube -- https://youtu.be/x_pWgRx7lno https://youtu.be/x_pWgRx7lno It's an amazing story. I wonder how much of the workplace health and safety processes from the blitz were still somewhat in force here. For instance there was a mid-blitz technique of soaking unexploded bombs in liquid oxygen to cool and pause a battery in the anti-tamper device that otherwise made the bomb impossible to defuse. But golly, that's an unhealthy sentence to type in a 2020s not-at-war part of the world.
Luc 3y ago
Amazing how nobody got hurt really. Luckily iodine-131 has a half life of 8 days.
- _aaed 3y ago
  About 200 people died from cancers related to this
  - Luc 3y ago
    That was the prediction. But ultimately no correlation was found. Source: Mahaffey, "Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters"
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - awaythrow98765 3y ago
    This is assuming the LNT (linear no threshold) model of radiation damage is true. Which it probably isn't. Lower than predicted deaths from accidents such as Windscale/Sellafield are sometimes taken as arguments against LNT. However, in all such discussions, one needs to be aware of the strong interest of the British government to keep all things around it's nuclear weapons program secret. So maybe the public figures are fake.
    - HPsquared 3y ago
      Few things in medicine are linear. DNA has error-correcting codes, much like a hard drive or network connection. In hard drives or networks, errors are tolerable below a certain threshold. It's a different story once unrecoverable errors start to occur (data loss, system crashes, perhaps errors getting caught by higher-level things like exceptions). I'd expect DNA, cells and biological systems are probably similar. The error correcting mechanisms can probably handle some errors up to a threshold (which probably itself varies between individuals).
pjc50 3y ago
As some of the other comments have noted, Windscale (now Sellafield) was part of the British nuclear weapons programme. That covered everything in secrecy which was bad for public trust. And this has always been difficult to extricate from uranium-based processes. It's where the "peace" in "Greenpeace" comes from; a lot of historical opposition to nuclear reactors was driven by the knowledge that the resulting plutonium would be used to make even more bombs. The worst case of this was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera , a foreshadow of the "weapons of mass destruction" excuse for attacking Iraq.
jbyers 3y ago
This article is not particularly detailed, authoritative, or newsworthy. Wikipedia offers a better overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
Neil44 3y ago
Strange choice linking to the Mirror version of this story.
acidburnNSA 3y ago
This was a bad accident and a fascinating story. I would like to just remind everyone of safety context, where the WHO is currently estimating 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate emissions from fossil and biofuel combustion energy sources. Despite several high-profile and memorable nuclear accidents, nuclear fission remains among the safest and cleanest ways we know to make electricity. Plus it's low-carbon to boot. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
- Mindwipe 3y ago
  The problem is - a) the British state has a very, very long track record of lying about domestic nuclear, so the public finds any safety claims hard to take seriously. b) the main issue with nuclear power in the UK is economic - the public have had to take on genuinely enormous liabilities in pensions and cleanup liabilities from every previous attempt, so do not take the cost projections for future sites at face value. And quite rationally so. But if we assume that liability overruns from the taxpayer were to happen at the same rate, the economic case for nuclear versus renewables on a small, windy, rainy island with a lot of tides disappears.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    c) up until about 1990, nuclear reactors using U -> Pu cycles were a critical component of building nuclear weapons, and the designed intent of nuclear weapons was casualty figures in the hundreds of millions. This sat uneasily alongside a policy of "of course we don't intend to actually do that unless threatened". Every now and again people remember this when looking at Iran, Ukraine, Taiwan etc. d) the last UK agriculture impact of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster were lifted in 2012. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cumbria-18299228 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cumbria-18299228
  - DrBazza 3y ago
    a) evidence? What the UK has a long long track record of, is CND and Greenpeace misrepresenting or outright lying to the general public about all aspects of nuclear power and often conflating it with nuclear weapons. I trust scientists over Doris, 63, from Derby, who doesn't like nuclear power 'for reasons'. b) All Western countries have an economic problem with nuclear power because the government has been involved since day one for obvious military reasons, limiting the ability to commercialise it and hence reduce costs. SpaceX launches cost 10% of government launches because they've been allowed to commercialise rockets.
azubinski 3y ago
"...resulted in a tragedy worse than Chernobyl" Tragedies are tragedies, and only scoundrels compete on the scale of tragedies. But in fairness, this accident was small compared to Chernobyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
EliRivers 3y ago
Apropos of the theme, I have a family member who does height work. Every year (typically in the months where weather will allow), he gets contracted to do some disassembly of buildings at Sellafield (Windscale as was). What follows is hearsay, but still fun :) The typical way to raze building involves just knocking them down; these are actual disassemblies. They'll go up and unbolt and slice off pieces, and carefully lower them, where they'll be examined and tagged and bagged for onwards disposal. It's a really expensive way to remove a building. There are sections of the site where he's been told "do NOT stop walking in front of THIS building". There are rooms (and maybe entire buildings) for which the records of what radioactive fun went on in them have been lost. There are dangerously radioactive (provenance unknown) things effectively dumped in ponds that have to be removed carefully, a piece at a time, possibly involving underwater disassembly. Possibly including a car that sucked up a big dose of something it shouldn't and needed to be made relatively safer, quickly. The only saving grace is that when you have to disassemble things so slowly, the handful of people hired to do it can literally only be paid so much per day. It's going to cost orders of magnitude more than just knocking a building down, but spread over decades and decades.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Your family member is hopefully wearing a dosimeter while doing all that. Sounds scary as can be.
  - AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
    Anyone working in a facility like this is absolutely wearing multiple dosimeters. They will have a cumulative exposure meter, this measures a total amount of dosage over a period of time and is how official things like monthly/yearly/lifetime limits for radiation workers are calculated. This meter is for things like "oops you went 2% over your yearly radiation dose and it's only November you have to stop working until January or you increase your lifetime cancer risk by .94%" They will also have an acute meter, this is basically a tiny geiger counter which alarms above specific levels. This is for situations like "oh shit that pipe you just stepped next to has a leak and if you don't leave the room in the next 60 seconds, your never going to have any kids (or much worse)." In some highly critical locations, it's possible for people to wear multiples of each of these, especially the cumulative meters because they are cheap and there might be multiple stakeholders who each have a process for ensuring compliance (e.g. your employer requires one, the facility requires one and the government requires one) -- this is rare bureaucratic nonsense but happens. For the acute meters you might have multiple just for redundancy. It would really suck if you don't find out you're getting an abnormal dose until your friend walks into the room you've been standing in for an hour, or worse, when your cumulative meter is read days/weeks later.
JohnCClarke 3y ago
I've noticed there are a lot of people on this site who favor nuclear energy. Given that it's just a technology choice, and that there are much cheaper [1], faster, options available I wonder why? --- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quI_8xYSWYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quI_8xYSWYE
- petercooper 3y ago
  A good video! Just to attempt a potentially frivolous answer to your question, the "race" in her video is about economic factors and this is often not particularly interesting to engineering minded folks, whereas nuclear power has all sorts of fun challenges, options, and processes going on. It's more interesting, perhaps, even if it's not the best option in a pragmatic sense.
  - JohnCClarke 3y ago
    TBH: That's I think too!
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  There is a pervasive narrative in certain groups that renewables fundamentally cannot do "the job" of providing power for all of humanity. They cherry pick issues from current small scale deployments, ignore all the times and places it works just fine, and claim that only nuclear can handle our needs without reducing our way of life. This is done at least by some in order to attempt to get funding redirected away from solar and wind and storage projects and research into the money pit of nuclear power plants and research. They do this because they actually care about having to rely on fossil fuels for as long as possible. This is why a lot of conservatives in Texas believe their winter storm horrors were caused by wind turbines, which they often call "windmills" for some reason, even though if you call a magazine "a clip" they will rip your head off and complain that you shouldn't be allowed to make policy about something you don't understand.
  - gambiting 3y ago
    Wait, I'm confused. In countries with heavy renewables investment in Europe, there are days when they make so much energy they have to export it, and there are days when the wind doesn't blow quite as much so they have to import energy instead. That is a fact, right? Not some right wing propaganda. So if we know this is a fact, how can we address the fact that renewables dip below what we need from time to time? How do you handle the baseload? I don't think that's "cherrypicking" - more like a fundamental issue that as far as I can see has only couple ways of being addressed - either have plants that run on fossil fuels, or.....nuclear power. Out of the two, nuclear wins easily when it comes to environmental cost, no? Like....is literally anything I said in any way controversial?
epmatsw 3y ago
Reminds me a bit of the Rocky Flats fire & contamination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_contamination_from_the_Rocky_Flats_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_contamination_from...
HPsquared 3y ago
Such an awful name, given what happened.

58 points by myth_drannon 3y ago

https://archive.ph/aEJxE https://archive.ph/aEJxE

The event was not an isolated incident; there had been a series of radioactive discharges from the piles in the years leading up to the accident. In the spring of 1957, only months before the fire, there was a leak of radioactive material in which strontium-90 isotopes were released into the environment. Like the later fire, this incident was also covered up by the British government. Later studies on the release of radioactive material due to the Windscale fire revealed that much of the contamination had resulted from such radiation leaks before the fire.

DoneWithAllThat 3y ago
This is a literal copy/paste from the Wikipedia article, word for word.

Gordonjcp 3y ago

It would have been a lot worse without "Cockcroft's Folly" - massive filters built on top of the "chimneys" that caught radioactive crud coming up the stack. These reactors weren't build for nuclear power or anything, they were built to create the right kind of nuclear materials for weapons. They were essentially a couple of bloody great big nuclear bonfires! He also along with Ernest Walton developed the Cockcroft-Walton multiplier, which is a clever arrangement of capacitors and diodes that produce a very high voltage from an AC source. Initially these were used in "atom smashing" cyclotrons, but came to be used in every CRT television you've ever seen.

Mindwipe 3y ago
Indeed, people should always bear in mind Windscale was a nuclear weapons facility hidden inside a power plant than a genuine attempt at a power station.
- Maakuth 3y ago
  From what I've read, I don't think there was any sort of power plant around even for pretense.
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    I think the worlds first commercial nuclear reactors had just started operating at the time of the accident. But they were separate and built later.
pfdietz 3y ago
There is a somewhat similar technology for LWRs: systems that filter soluble fission products (including iodine in second generation systems) from steam so the steam can be vented from the containment structure in an accident. These would have been very useful at Fukushima. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1224/ML12248A021.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1224/ML12248A021.pdf The Cockcroft-Walton scheme was not for cyclotrons, but rather for a simple linear potential drop accelerator. Cyclotrons build up the energy of particles over many iterations, so they don't need that high a voltage.
dang 3y ago
There's a good article about that which was discussed here: Windscale Piles: Cockcroft's Follies avoided nuclear disaster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558045 - Nov 2014 (15 comments)

itronitron 3y ago

After reading The Greenpeace Book of the Nuclear Age, which chronicles all major nuclear incidents (up to the 1990's I think) I had two key takeaways. There are far more missing nuclear submarines than I would have ever expected, and Britain does not have the right cultural mindset for dealing with nuclear safety. Apologies if that offends anyone.

badcppdev 3y ago
Follow up question. Can you name a country that does have a good cultural mindset for nuclear safety? Years ago I used to naively assume the Japanese were very safety conscious and then I read details post-Fukushima that made me realise that the corporate managerial mindset rules there as well.
- willyt 3y ago
  I've come to think that France might have a good culture in this respect. No major train crashes for years; there's never been a serious accident on the TGV. They have nuclear reactors all over the place and they seem to have managed to operate them safely. Airbus by all accounts seems to have a good safety culture. Maybe it's because of the 'fraternité' in 'liberté égalité fraternité; they have very strong culture of public solidarity and very low income inequality compared to say Britain or the US. And maybe that's why it doesn't cost a fortune to build high speed rail there as well; because there is a moral element to it that means you don't rip off your fellow countrymen.
  - pookha 3y ago
    France standardized all of their reactors. You could swap components in and out of any number of their nuclear reactors. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-the-nuclear-fuel-cycle-what-can-oui-learn https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t... That's not how most other countries handled their nuclear power architecture and I think it's one of the main reasons why France has had major success with no issues. There's nothing flashy about how their nuclear reactors operate but they're very easy to staff and maintain long-term.

equalsione 3y ago

Revisiting the 1957 Windscale Nuclear Accident using Atmospheric Reanalysis data - The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) https://www.ichec.ie/news/revisiting-1957-windscale-nuclear-accident-using-atmospheric-reanalysis-data https://www.ichec.ie/news/revisiting-1957-windscale-nuclear-...

cduzz 3y ago

There's a great documentary about this on youtube -- https://youtu.be/x_pWgRx7lno https://youtu.be/x_pWgRx7lno It's an amazing story. I wonder how much of the workplace health and safety processes from the blitz were still somewhat in force here. For instance there was a mid-blitz technique of soaking unexploded bombs in liquid oxygen to cool and pause a battery in the anti-tamper device that otherwise made the bomb impossible to defuse. But golly, that's an unhealthy sentence to type in a 2020s not-at-war part of the world.

Luc 3y ago

Amazing how nobody got hurt really. Luckily iodine-131 has a half life of 8 days.

_aaed 3y ago
About 200 people died from cancers related to this
- Luc 3y ago
  That was the prediction. But ultimately no correlation was found. Source: Mahaffey, "Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters"
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- awaythrow98765 3y ago
  This is assuming the LNT (linear no threshold) model of radiation damage is true. Which it probably isn't. Lower than predicted deaths from accidents such as Windscale/Sellafield are sometimes taken as arguments against LNT. However, in all such discussions, one needs to be aware of the strong interest of the British government to keep all things around it's nuclear weapons program secret. So maybe the public figures are fake.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    Few things in medicine are linear. DNA has error-correcting codes, much like a hard drive or network connection. In hard drives or networks, errors are tolerable below a certain threshold. It's a different story once unrecoverable errors start to occur (data loss, system crashes, perhaps errors getting caught by higher-level things like exceptions). I'd expect DNA, cells and biological systems are probably similar. The error correcting mechanisms can probably handle some errors up to a threshold (which probably itself varies between individuals).

pjc50 3y ago

As some of the other comments have noted, Windscale (now Sellafield) was part of the British nuclear weapons programme. That covered everything in secrecy which was bad for public trust. And this has always been difficult to extricate from uranium-based processes. It's where the "peace" in "Greenpeace" comes from; a lot of historical opposition to nuclear reactors was driven by the knowledge that the resulting plutonium would be used to make even more bombs. The worst case of this was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera , a foreshadow of the "weapons of mass destruction" excuse for attacking Iraq.

jbyers 3y ago

This article is not particularly detailed, authoritative, or newsworthy. Wikipedia offers a better overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

Neil44 3y ago

Strange choice linking to the Mirror version of this story.

acidburnNSA 3y ago

This was a bad accident and a fascinating story. I would like to just remind everyone of safety context, where the WHO is currently estimating 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate emissions from fossil and biofuel combustion energy sources. Despite several high-profile and memorable nuclear accidents, nuclear fission remains among the safest and cleanest ways we know to make electricity. Plus it's low-carbon to boot. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Mindwipe 3y ago
The problem is - a) the British state has a very, very long track record of lying about domestic nuclear, so the public finds any safety claims hard to take seriously. b) the main issue with nuclear power in the UK is economic - the public have had to take on genuinely enormous liabilities in pensions and cleanup liabilities from every previous attempt, so do not take the cost projections for future sites at face value. And quite rationally so. But if we assume that liability overruns from the taxpayer were to happen at the same rate, the economic case for nuclear versus renewables on a small, windy, rainy island with a lot of tides disappears.
- pjc50 3y ago
  c) up until about 1990, nuclear reactors using U -> Pu cycles were a critical component of building nuclear weapons, and the designed intent of nuclear weapons was casualty figures in the hundreds of millions. This sat uneasily alongside a policy of "of course we don't intend to actually do that unless threatened". Every now and again people remember this when looking at Iran, Ukraine, Taiwan etc. d) the last UK agriculture impact of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster were lifted in 2012. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cumbria-18299228 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cumbria-18299228
- DrBazza 3y ago
  a) evidence? What the UK has a long long track record of, is CND and Greenpeace misrepresenting or outright lying to the general public about all aspects of nuclear power and often conflating it with nuclear weapons. I trust scientists over Doris, 63, from Derby, who doesn't like nuclear power 'for reasons'. b) All Western countries have an economic problem with nuclear power because the government has been involved since day one for obvious military reasons, limiting the ability to commercialise it and hence reduce costs. SpaceX launches cost 10% of government launches because they've been allowed to commercialise rockets.

azubinski 3y ago

"...resulted in a tragedy worse than Chernobyl" Tragedies are tragedies, and only scoundrels compete on the scale of tragedies. But in fairness, this accident was small compared to Chernobyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

EliRivers 3y ago

Apropos of the theme, I have a family member who does height work. Every year (typically in the months where weather will allow), he gets contracted to do some disassembly of buildings at Sellafield (Windscale as was). What follows is hearsay, but still fun :) The typical way to raze building involves just knocking them down; these are actual disassemblies. They'll go up and unbolt and slice off pieces, and carefully lower them, where they'll be examined and tagged and bagged for onwards disposal. It's a really expensive way to remove a building. There are sections of the site where he's been told "do NOT stop walking in front of THIS building". There are rooms (and maybe entire buildings) for which the records of what radioactive fun went on in them have been lost. There are dangerously radioactive (provenance unknown) things effectively dumped in ponds that have to be removed carefully, a piece at a time, possibly involving underwater disassembly. Possibly including a car that sucked up a big dose of something it shouldn't and needed to be made relatively safer, quickly. The only saving grace is that when you have to disassemble things so slowly, the handful of people hired to do it can literally only be paid so much per day. It's going to cost orders of magnitude more than just knocking a building down, but spread over decades and decades.

jacquesm 3y ago
Your family member is hopefully wearing a dosimeter while doing all that. Sounds scary as can be.
- AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
  Anyone working in a facility like this is absolutely wearing multiple dosimeters. They will have a cumulative exposure meter, this measures a total amount of dosage over a period of time and is how official things like monthly/yearly/lifetime limits for radiation workers are calculated. This meter is for things like "oops you went 2% over your yearly radiation dose and it's only November you have to stop working until January or you increase your lifetime cancer risk by .94%" They will also have an acute meter, this is basically a tiny geiger counter which alarms above specific levels. This is for situations like "oh shit that pipe you just stepped next to has a leak and if you don't leave the room in the next 60 seconds, your never going to have any kids (or much worse)." In some highly critical locations, it's possible for people to wear multiples of each of these, especially the cumulative meters because they are cheap and there might be multiple stakeholders who each have a process for ensuring compliance (e.g. your employer requires one, the facility requires one and the government requires one) -- this is rare bureaucratic nonsense but happens. For the acute meters you might have multiple just for redundancy. It would really suck if you don't find out you're getting an abnormal dose until your friend walks into the room you've been standing in for an hour, or worse, when your cumulative meter is read days/weeks later.

JohnCClarke 3y ago

I've noticed there are a lot of people on this site who favor nuclear energy. Given that it's just a technology choice, and that there are much cheaper [1], faster, options available I wonder why? --- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quI_8xYSWYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quI_8xYSWYE

petercooper 3y ago
A good video! Just to attempt a potentially frivolous answer to your question, the "race" in her video is about economic factors and this is often not particularly interesting to engineering minded folks, whereas nuclear power has all sorts of fun challenges, options, and processes going on. It's more interesting, perhaps, even if it's not the best option in a pragmatic sense.
- JohnCClarke 3y ago
  TBH: That's I think too!
mrguyorama 3y ago
There is a pervasive narrative in certain groups that renewables fundamentally cannot do "the job" of providing power for all of humanity. They cherry pick issues from current small scale deployments, ignore all the times and places it works just fine, and claim that only nuclear can handle our needs without reducing our way of life. This is done at least by some in order to attempt to get funding redirected away from solar and wind and storage projects and research into the money pit of nuclear power plants and research. They do this because they actually care about having to rely on fossil fuels for as long as possible. This is why a lot of conservatives in Texas believe their winter storm horrors were caused by wind turbines, which they often call "windmills" for some reason, even though if you call a magazine "a clip" they will rip your head off and complain that you shouldn't be allowed to make policy about something you don't understand.
- gambiting 3y ago
  Wait, I'm confused. In countries with heavy renewables investment in Europe, there are days when they make so much energy they have to export it, and there are days when the wind doesn't blow quite as much so they have to import energy instead. That is a fact, right? Not some right wing propaganda. So if we know this is a fact, how can we address the fact that renewables dip below what we need from time to time? How do you handle the baseload? I don't think that's "cherrypicking" - more like a fundamental issue that as far as I can see has only couple ways of being addressed - either have plants that run on fossil fuels, or.....nuclear power. Out of the two, nuclear wins easily when it comes to environmental cost, no? Like....is literally anything I said in any way controversial?

epmatsw 3y ago

Reminds me a bit of the Rocky Flats fire & contamination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_contamination_from_the_Rocky_Flats_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_contamination_from...

HPsquared 3y ago

Such an awful name, given what happened.