5 ms·

I think the 'catastrohpic failure' argument is overblown. How many events have occurred when there was large scale contamination? Obviously Chernobyl. Yet point

I think the 'catastrohpic failure' argument is overblown. How many events have occurred when there was large scale contamination? Obviously Chernobyl. Yet pointing to this I think is a cop out. A corrupt, secrecy driven regime 40 years is not equivalent to a modern society in the 2020s. What people don't understand is there has been literally decades of nuclear power generation over hundreds of reactors worldwide with zero issues.

bugglebeetle 3y ago
> Yet pointing to this I think is a cop out. A corrupt, secrecy driven regime 40 years is not equivalent to a modern society in the 2020s. I’d say the current state of American infrastructure, with our collapsing highways and constantly derailing trains that poison entire towns, would suggest otherwise.
- thatswrong0 3y ago
  This is a bit reductionist, as we're talking about vastly different scales of infrastructure here governed by very different institutions with very different expectations imposed upon them by the population. From some admittedly quick research, there are apparently 600,000 road bridges in the US, and the continued maintenance of these bridges is dispersed between 50 different state governments. The US 140,000 miles of railroad track that transports 61 tons of goods per American per year. The scale of the size and use of road and rail systems in the United States are off the charts massive. This is not to excuse the issues you're referring to (they are real and they should definitely be fixed), but the context in which these issues are occurring is important when comparing to something like nuclear. And it's not like it's all bad when it comes to massive infrastructure in the US: 1.7 million people fly in the US every day, and the last fatal crash on a commercial airlines occurred in 2009. It's actually kind of mindblowing that flying in the US right now is probably the safest mode of transport.. ever? Clearly the US is capable of regulating _some_ things well from a safety perspective. So.. there are only 92 active nuclear reactors in the United States, all of which are regulated under a single independent agency of the US federal government (the NRC). It's a much smaller, more tractable problem than general transportation infrastructure. The worst accident occurred in 1979 and the total amount of deaths in the US caused by the industry are vanishingly small compared to so many other industries (even if you use the worst estimates from the TMI accident). The regulations and associated costs surrounding nuclear are such that we have fewer reactors now than we had in 1990. And the designs and technology of nuclear reactors continues to be improvements upon (what happened at Chernobyl specifically is basically not possible anywhere in the world besides the Russia). I just don't think it really makes sense to cast into doubt the entirety of the US government's ability to keep people safe at all (including from scary things like nuclear) just because we are seeing _some_ things go wrong at times (and I say this as someone who does in fact have very little faith in the efficacy for the US government generally speaking). Context and historical performance matter.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Air travel is so safe that anything that makes it more expensive has a real cost in lives, since it will cause some people to save money by driving instead. Somewhere (here on HN?) there was a link about an FAA decision to not require car seats for infant passengers. This would require purchase of another seat for the infant, and FAA calculated the cost in lives from this effect would be 60x that of the lives saved by the car seats.
lrem 3y ago
There have been multiple catastrophic failures of dams, which I was writing about. The last one left about 600 square km (150k acres) flooded with major epidemiological (well, plus landmines) risk and 6000 square km (1.5M acres) of irrigation loss in farmland.
sam_lowry_ 3y ago
There were 30 deaths directly attributed to Chernobyl and ~4000 statistical deaths due to radiation exposure. This is comparable to the North Sea flood [1] with 2,551 instant deaths. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953

bugglebeetle 3y ago

> Yet pointing to this I think is a cop out. A corrupt, secrecy driven regime 40 years is not equivalent to a modern society in the 2020s. I’d say the current state of American infrastructure, with our collapsing highways and constantly derailing trains that poison entire towns, would suggest otherwise.

thatswrong0 3y ago
This is a bit reductionist, as we're talking about vastly different scales of infrastructure here governed by very different institutions with very different expectations imposed upon them by the population. From some admittedly quick research, there are apparently 600,000 road bridges in the US, and the continued maintenance of these bridges is dispersed between 50 different state governments. The US 140,000 miles of railroad track that transports 61 tons of goods per American per year. The scale of the size and use of road and rail systems in the United States are off the charts massive. This is not to excuse the issues you're referring to (they are real and they should definitely be fixed), but the context in which these issues are occurring is important when comparing to something like nuclear. And it's not like it's all bad when it comes to massive infrastructure in the US: 1.7 million people fly in the US every day, and the last fatal crash on a commercial airlines occurred in 2009. It's actually kind of mindblowing that flying in the US right now is probably the safest mode of transport.. ever? Clearly the US is capable of regulating _some_ things well from a safety perspective. So.. there are only 92 active nuclear reactors in the United States, all of which are regulated under a single independent agency of the US federal government (the NRC). It's a much smaller, more tractable problem than general transportation infrastructure. The worst accident occurred in 1979 and the total amount of deaths in the US caused by the industry are vanishingly small compared to so many other industries (even if you use the worst estimates from the TMI accident). The regulations and associated costs surrounding nuclear are such that we have fewer reactors now than we had in 1990. And the designs and technology of nuclear reactors continues to be improvements upon (what happened at Chernobyl specifically is basically not possible anywhere in the world besides the Russia). I just don't think it really makes sense to cast into doubt the entirety of the US government's ability to keep people safe at all (including from scary things like nuclear) just because we are seeing _some_ things go wrong at times (and I say this as someone who does in fact have very little faith in the efficacy for the US government generally speaking). Context and historical performance matter.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Air travel is so safe that anything that makes it more expensive has a real cost in lives, since it will cause some people to save money by driving instead. Somewhere (here on HN?) there was a link about an FAA decision to not require car seats for infant passengers. This would require purchase of another seat for the infant, and FAA calculated the cost in lives from this effect would be 60x that of the lives saved by the car seats.

lrem 3y ago

There have been multiple catastrophic failures of dams, which I was writing about. The last one left about 600 square km (150k acres) flooded with major epidemiological (well, plus landmines) risk and 6000 square km (1.5M acres) of irrigation loss in farmland.

sam_lowry_ 3y ago

There were 30 deaths directly attributed to Chernobyl and ~4000 statistical deaths due to radiation exposure. This is comparable to the North Sea flood [1] with 2,551 instant deaths. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953