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The article is fine, but the link in its Footnote 3 is the really interesting part: https://www.ans.org/news/article-1556/tmi-operators-did-what-they-were-train

The article is fine, but the link in its Footnote 3 is the really interesting part: https://www.ans.org/news/article-1556/tmi-operators-did-what-they-were-trained-to-do/ https://www.ans.org/news/article-1556/tmi-operators-did-what... It's a story from the Davis Besse NPP operators, who happened to face the exact same fault as caused the accident at Three Mile Island... and made it through OK... except they experienced it first, 18 months earlier. So why, when this happened a second time, did no one learn from the first occurrence? Why were people more worried about assigning blame, substandard training materials, and taking cover from lawsuits, than about ensuring this could not happen again? THIS is why we cannot have nice things. It does not matter whether the technology can or cannot be implemented safely. It matters whether the human organizations that support that technology are up to the task of managing something where a single mistake can ruin tens of millions of people's lives, with consequences for ten thousand years. It's not like one plane dropping out of the sky, ruining 500 people's lives... this is a much longer term problem. And probabilistic risk assessment, as technically correct as it is when it gets perfect input information, is absolutely horrid at driving humans to make the right choices.

jenadine 3y ago
I agree with you, but you are overestimating the cost on live of an accident by many orders of magnitude. How do you get to the tens of millions of live ruinned?
- toyg 3y ago
  Chernobyl and surrounding areas had to be fully evacuated, and it was a pretty remote site in a very sparsely populated country. That's not tens of millions but probably in the single millions. If it happened in a denser area, like France or the US East Coast, it would probably reach 10m relatively easily.
  - jenadine 3y ago
    According to Wikipedia, there was less than 200k people evacuated for Chernobyl. Also, if you take a 30km radius, multiplied by the population density of California, you get only 274k people. (And I'm pretty sure that the powerplant are build in area which are less populated than the average). As we leaned since, 30km radius is probably over-doing it. That's considering the life of someone being evacuated to be "ruined"
  - XorNot 3y ago
    Chernobyl is also not Three Mile Island. Chernobyl is so exceptional that it shouldn't be included in these discussions at all unless you're literally planning to build an RBMK reactor with out a containment building again and graphite tipped control rods.
- exmadscientist 3y ago
  My brain pulled that number from the article's discussion of Fukushima: > In the worst case scenario, not made public until long after the disaster, the entire Tokyo Metropolitan Area - 35 million people - would have to be moved to temporary shelter. The very existence of the nation of Japan was at stake. And no one - not TEPCO, the utility that owned Fukushima, not the Prime Minister, not the Japanese military - could do anything but hope. Feel free to call that unreasonably-worst-case or just hyperbole. (It kind of is.) But that's where I got it.
gizmondo 3y ago
This is the story of the Chernobyl disaster as well. There had been two similar accidents preceding it, in 1975 at the Leningrad NPP and in 1983 at the Ignalina NPP. Only after the second one the design flaws were well understood, but they weren't fixed in the following years.

jenadine 3y ago

I agree with you, but you are overestimating the cost on live of an accident by many orders of magnitude. How do you get to the tens of millions of live ruinned?

toyg 3y ago
Chernobyl and surrounding areas had to be fully evacuated, and it was a pretty remote site in a very sparsely populated country. That's not tens of millions but probably in the single millions. If it happened in a denser area, like France or the US East Coast, it would probably reach 10m relatively easily.
- jenadine 3y ago
  According to Wikipedia, there was less than 200k people evacuated for Chernobyl. Also, if you take a 30km radius, multiplied by the population density of California, you get only 274k people. (And I'm pretty sure that the powerplant are build in area which are less populated than the average). As we leaned since, 30km radius is probably over-doing it. That's considering the life of someone being evacuated to be "ruined"
- XorNot 3y ago
  Chernobyl is also not Three Mile Island. Chernobyl is so exceptional that it shouldn't be included in these discussions at all unless you're literally planning to build an RBMK reactor with out a containment building again and graphite tipped control rods.
exmadscientist 3y ago
My brain pulled that number from the article's discussion of Fukushima: > In the worst case scenario, not made public until long after the disaster, the entire Tokyo Metropolitan Area - 35 million people - would have to be moved to temporary shelter. The very existence of the nation of Japan was at stake. And no one - not TEPCO, the utility that owned Fukushima, not the Prime Minister, not the Japanese military - could do anything but hope. Feel free to call that unreasonably-worst-case or just hyperbole. (It kind of is.) But that's where I got it.

gizmondo 3y ago

This is the story of the Chernobyl disaster as well. There had been two similar accidents preceding it, in 1975 at the Leningrad NPP and in 1983 at the Ignalina NPP. Only after the second one the design flaws were well understood, but they weren't fixed in the following years.