9 ms·

What really went wrong at 3 mile island? No one died or was injured afaik.

lazide 3y ago
it was a lot closer call than should have been possible. And everyone got very scared, and the gov’t lost a lot of credibility. It was no Chernobyl, but it made it clear the US wasn’t perfect either.
- roenxi 3y ago
  That is what happened, but I can't pass by without highlighting how irrational the response was. I've been watching a livestream of Reykjanes in the vague hope of seeing some magma. Somewhere globally needs to be evacuated every year or so. Going from base rate to base rate +1 per 2 decades or thereabouts is a perfectly acceptable deal. Nobody is going to die (which is more than can be said about coal). We'd get cheap clean energy. And instead people decided that the best plan was to panic and we end up with the gently building energy crisis that has been rolling on for a few years now. It is entirely plausible we see the bloodiest war in human history as a result of the Western derailment of the transition to nuclear power. It was really foolish. Who cares that the US government are incompetent? Yeah they're incompetent. They've been incompetent for a long while. They still snuffed out one of the most (arguably the most?) promising technologies of a generation out of fear and ignorance.
  - nickpp 3y ago
    That irrational response was heavily fueled by fear mongering from environmental activists and financed by oil producing hostile countries. In the 70s and 80s leftists couldn't much keep pushing socialism (like they are now) since the horrors of their ideology was quite visible to everybody in the example of USSR. So they embraced environmentalism - just another way for them to fight capitalism and consumerism. Russia (through the KGB) was quite happy to finance their cause. It meant Western countries (and especially Western Europe) stayed dependent on them for their energy. The folly of our strategy became quite apparent during the last few years with the Ukraine invasion and revelations of EU politicians fully paid and owned by the Russians. Together with infiltrating the Western Academia, this was probably one of the most successful undercover secret service operation ever.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      This view is extremely US centrict with regards to what socialism is. It also ignores decades of history when it comes European relations with the USSR and Russia later. Mixed with some red-scare level fears it turns into pure dilussion at the end...
      - nickpp 3y ago
        Funny enough I was born, grew up and I currently live in the Eastern Europe. I could tell you so much about our history and relations with Russia. From my own experience before '90, from my parents' during communism horror years and from my grandparents' during the War and the soviet occupation after. But all that info is freely available in books and online - for naught. You can't change the mind of the Western leftists who never had to live through an actual implementation of their pet ideology. They dream about Norway, Sweden and Denmark while never even visiting Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela.
        hef19898 3y ago
        Communism isn't socialism. Cuba is as close to old school communism as you get nowadays, Venezuela is cleptocratic, deeply corrupt regime ehixh has not much to do with either socialism or communism. And North Korea, well, what can I say, is just North Korea.
        nickpp 3y ago
        It's never "true communism", of course. That has never been tried. Yeah, right.
        hef19898 3y ago
        Who talked about true communism? Communism was tried, didn't work. Your own words by the way. There is a very important difference between communism and socialism, because the latter has been tried multiple times and worked comparatively well. You even named some of the poster child countries yourself. As I said, it is a truely US thing to equate socialism with communism, followed by touting Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea as negative examples of it.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    "Who cares that the US government are incompetent? Yeah they're incompetent." I care, if they are responsible for overseeing the safety of the nuclear reactors.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Oversight that is explicitly called out throughout the repoets on the Chernobyl desaster, by both the IAEA and the USSR. Always funny how the hardest nuclear proponents can't even bothered reading the executive summaries of incident reports prepared by the nuclear industry itself.
      - roenxi 3y ago
        Am I going to get push-back for saying economic policy makers should hold USSR reports with suspicion? Their ability to make rational decisions was so hopeless their civilisation collapsed. Doing the exact opposite of their economic recommendations is a strategy that is legitimately on the table. And oversight is different from strangulation. If we could dial back the regulations to mere oversight I'd go find something else to talk about.
        hef19898 3y ago
        Who talked about "economic recommendations"? The IAEA INSAG-7 report, an update on the initial Chernobyl report INSAG-1, is a quick read (I just did it in the last 20 minutes or so). That report, which includes official translations of two USR incident reports, is all about safety and technical aspectsbof RBMK reactors, nowhere do they talk about the future use and deploymant of nuclear power plants. After all, all those reports were written by the people being as pro-nuclear as you could be in the late 80s... Granted, people back then wrote long form documents not published on social media. I linoed to the report elsewhere, ypu honestly should read it. Including the truely damning ones the Soviets wrote regarding safety, regulation and oversight at, and around, the Chernobyl power plant, especially affecting the extension units incl. rwaczor No. 4 which ultimately exploded.
        deleted 3y ago
  - lazide 3y ago
    When the hazard is one that; 1) the public cannot see 2) lacks the skills to properly independently evaluate the scope of (99% of the public doesn’t own a Geiger counter, and 99.9% would be unable to quantify risks even if they did) 3) is potentially lethal And the authorities the are supposed to be able to do #1 and #2 are caught repeatedly and obviously lying about the hazard. It’s perfectly rational for people to get ‘irrationally’ scared. All they know is the folks who are supposed to be protecting them from this actual threat are not credible! And there is an actual threat (probably)!
    - hef19898 3y ago
      You basically summarzied the reasoning of a Soviet working group investigating Chernobyl. The investigation is needed, because people, being occupied with the clean up, are reasonably scared and have no reason to believe government claims without a proper investigation. Yes, I spent some time today reading official reports on Chernobyl, again. Hell, even the Soviet reports are damning for their own nuclear industry, calling out organizations, people and structural defficiencies. As is the IAEA. And none of those groups can even remotely be accussed of being anti-nuclear.
    - _ea1k 3y ago
      Couldn't you say all of the same things about coal? The risks are largely invisible, people can't assess them, and people definitely die due to its use. Maybe there needs to be another criteria. Something like, "when the hazard comes with a scary label"?
      - lazide 3y ago
        No? Coal fires are pretty obvious. Acid rain is pretty obvious (and easy to measure with ph strips, which are easy to find). Nasty smog is pretty obvious. Plumes of gunk from smoke stacks are obvious. Now, co2 and fine particulate contamination (like say radioactive contamination from ash), yes. Those take decades to be noticable (if at all). There have been big issues because of it, statistically. But those are not well known/accepted either by the public. And certainly not the most common 'acute' problems. Something like a release of radiation from a nuclear power plant can (and usually is), completely invisible. As is things like ingesting fallout. It usually kills years or decades later. If you can see radiation, you're pretty much a dead man walking already. A reactor melting down is a sudden acute incident that can release massive amounts of completely invisible radioactive elements that won't kill anyone for decades - or in weeks/months, if really bad. By the time something has obviously gone wrong from the outside (like the core blowing up in Chernobyl, or the reactor building blowing up due to Hydrogen explosion in Fukushima), massive releases are essentially guaranteed. But still usually invisible. Cherenkov radiation 'sky beam' from chernobyl excepted. [https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1142309/Chernobyl-disaster-blue-beam-of-light-HBO-Chernobyl-real-nuclear-radiation https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1142309/Chernobyl-dis...] And with a little avoidance, a lethal dose might be easy to not have! If you have good data. Without good data, it's a crap shoot though.
  - bumby 3y ago
    Humans are inherently bad at estimating risk when it comes to low probability events. The fact that there was an irrational response shouldn’t surprise anyone.
metabagel 3y ago
It was an uncomfortably close call. I believe it was a near meltdown. Could have gone a different way.
- kalessin 3y ago
  It was a partial meltdown in a pressurized water reactor, it cannot be compared to Chernobyl, it's a completely different technology. PWRs can't explode like what happened in Chernobyl.
  - redprince 3y ago
    PWR is a "Pressurized Water Reactor" using (light) water under pressure as the primary coolant. The Chernobyl block #4 RBMK-1000 was certainly a PWR. While the precise mechanism by which the #4 reactor in Chernobyl was destroyed in 1986 was rooted in the flawed design combined with unsafe operation, this does not mean that other reactor designs cannot fail catastrophically with loss of containment and release of radioactive material. Particularly when operated outside of their specification through operator error, accidents or a combination thereof.
    - beefman 3y ago
      RBMK is not considered a PWR because it is graphite-moderated. Most reactors are classified first by their moderator. PWRs and BWRs are both LWRs, moderated by light water, as opposed to HWRs moderated by heavy water, or graphite-moderated reactors like RBMK, or fast reactors which have no moderator at all. Any reactor can fail and any can be operated safely. The reactivity coefficients of RBMK made it harder to control, perhaps, than a PWR. Modifications made after the Chernobyl accident have improved this. The main issue with Chernobyl 4 was its lack of a containment building. Even so, the response was an over-reaction that made the situation worse.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        RMBKs are an unsafe design. Chernobyl No. 4 was build in an unsafe manner and operated in an unsafe manner. Not sure which response to the accident was an over-reaction in your opinion so.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
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hef19898 3y ago
That is a pretty low bar to pass: success, our product failed but didn't injure or kill anyone unintentionally, nothing to see, move on.
- avar 3y ago
  It's a pretty high bar. Three mile island has a lifetime production of ~250 TWh, coal kills ~25 people per TWh. So if it had killed ~6000 people it would be within the accepted norms of the energy industry for anything that isn't nuclear. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
  - natmaka 3y ago
    Nowadays this is not about "nuclear vs. coal" but "nuclear vs. renewables (which are way less deadly than coal)".
- waveBidder 3y ago
  Compared with the constant deaths from coal, yeah, it's a much better bet. Thankfully moot these days, but the overreaction to these problems set us back generations at solving climate change.
Retric 3y ago
It was a partial meltdown that cause 2 billion dollars in inflation adjusted damages. While it harmed the public perception of nuclear, it was really the cost that slowed down investments in US nuclear which then had knock on effects long term. The best way to think about it is power companies had other investments they could make that had less risks even if they had lower returns. Thus the cost is balanced not vs 0 returns but in comparison to the added benefit from nuclear. Fewer investments meant losing knowledge of how to build the things which further reduced nuclear’s advantages. Until today when nuclear just can’t compete successfully and anyone that tries sees vast cost overruns.
- hef19898 3y ago
  That's usually the point when capitalism evagelists start ignoring capitalism and economics, isn't it?
gosub100 3y ago
No one has mentioned yet (what I find to be) the most important fact: radioactive gases were vented in a populated area without any consent, review, or approval. (inb4 the nerdsniping about how and why it had to be done,it's irrelevant to my point). If you lived in the area, your community was exposed to radioactive substances, and thats where the incident really crossed the line and got people worried.

it was a lot closer call than should have been possible. And everyone got very scared, and the gov’t lost a lot of credibility. It was no Chernobyl, but it made it clear the US wasn’t perfect either.

roenxi 3y ago
That is what happened, but I can't pass by without highlighting how irrational the response was. I've been watching a livestream of Reykjanes in the vague hope of seeing some magma. Somewhere globally needs to be evacuated every year or so. Going from base rate to base rate +1 per 2 decades or thereabouts is a perfectly acceptable deal. Nobody is going to die (which is more than can be said about coal). We'd get cheap clean energy. And instead people decided that the best plan was to panic and we end up with the gently building energy crisis that has been rolling on for a few years now. It is entirely plausible we see the bloodiest war in human history as a result of the Western derailment of the transition to nuclear power. It was really foolish. Who cares that the US government are incompetent? Yeah they're incompetent. They've been incompetent for a long while. They still snuffed out one of the most (arguably the most?) promising technologies of a generation out of fear and ignorance.
- nickpp 3y ago
  That irrational response was heavily fueled by fear mongering from environmental activists and financed by oil producing hostile countries. In the 70s and 80s leftists couldn't much keep pushing socialism (like they are now) since the horrors of their ideology was quite visible to everybody in the example of USSR. So they embraced environmentalism - just another way for them to fight capitalism and consumerism. Russia (through the KGB) was quite happy to finance their cause. It meant Western countries (and especially Western Europe) stayed dependent on them for their energy. The folly of our strategy became quite apparent during the last few years with the Ukraine invasion and revelations of EU politicians fully paid and owned by the Russians. Together with infiltrating the Western Academia, this was probably one of the most successful undercover secret service operation ever.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    This view is extremely US centrict with regards to what socialism is. It also ignores decades of history when it comes European relations with the USSR and Russia later. Mixed with some red-scare level fears it turns into pure dilussion at the end...
    - nickpp 3y ago
      Funny enough I was born, grew up and I currently live in the Eastern Europe. I could tell you so much about our history and relations with Russia. From my own experience before '90, from my parents' during communism horror years and from my grandparents' during the War and the soviet occupation after. But all that info is freely available in books and online - for naught. You can't change the mind of the Western leftists who never had to live through an actual implementation of their pet ideology. They dream about Norway, Sweden and Denmark while never even visiting Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Communism isn't socialism. Cuba is as close to old school communism as you get nowadays, Venezuela is cleptocratic, deeply corrupt regime ehixh has not much to do with either socialism or communism. And North Korea, well, what can I say, is just North Korea.
        nickpp 3y ago
        It's never "true communism", of course. That has never been tried. Yeah, right.
        hef19898 3y ago
        Who talked about true communism? Communism was tried, didn't work. Your own words by the way. There is a very important difference between communism and socialism, because the latter has been tried multiple times and worked comparatively well. You even named some of the poster child countries yourself. As I said, it is a truely US thing to equate socialism with communism, followed by touting Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea as negative examples of it.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  "Who cares that the US government are incompetent? Yeah they're incompetent." I care, if they are responsible for overseeing the safety of the nuclear reactors.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Oversight that is explicitly called out throughout the repoets on the Chernobyl desaster, by both the IAEA and the USSR. Always funny how the hardest nuclear proponents can't even bothered reading the executive summaries of incident reports prepared by the nuclear industry itself.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      Am I going to get push-back for saying economic policy makers should hold USSR reports with suspicion? Their ability to make rational decisions was so hopeless their civilisation collapsed. Doing the exact opposite of their economic recommendations is a strategy that is legitimately on the table. And oversight is different from strangulation. If we could dial back the regulations to mere oversight I'd go find something else to talk about.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Who talked about "economic recommendations"? The IAEA INSAG-7 report, an update on the initial Chernobyl report INSAG-1, is a quick read (I just did it in the last 20 minutes or so). That report, which includes official translations of two USR incident reports, is all about safety and technical aspectsbof RBMK reactors, nowhere do they talk about the future use and deploymant of nuclear power plants. After all, all those reports were written by the people being as pro-nuclear as you could be in the late 80s... Granted, people back then wrote long form documents not published on social media. I linoed to the report elsewhere, ypu honestly should read it. Including the truely damning ones the Soviets wrote regarding safety, regulation and oversight at, and around, the Chernobyl power plant, especially affecting the extension units incl. rwaczor No. 4 which ultimately exploded.
        deleted 3y ago
- lazide 3y ago
  When the hazard is one that; 1) the public cannot see 2) lacks the skills to properly independently evaluate the scope of (99% of the public doesn’t own a Geiger counter, and 99.9% would be unable to quantify risks even if they did) 3) is potentially lethal And the authorities the are supposed to be able to do #1 and #2 are caught repeatedly and obviously lying about the hazard. It’s perfectly rational for people to get ‘irrationally’ scared. All they know is the folks who are supposed to be protecting them from this actual threat are not credible! And there is an actual threat (probably)!
  - hef19898 3y ago
    You basically summarzied the reasoning of a Soviet working group investigating Chernobyl. The investigation is needed, because people, being occupied with the clean up, are reasonably scared and have no reason to believe government claims without a proper investigation. Yes, I spent some time today reading official reports on Chernobyl, again. Hell, even the Soviet reports are damning for their own nuclear industry, calling out organizations, people and structural defficiencies. As is the IAEA. And none of those groups can even remotely be accussed of being anti-nuclear.
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    Couldn't you say all of the same things about coal? The risks are largely invisible, people can't assess them, and people definitely die due to its use. Maybe there needs to be another criteria. Something like, "when the hazard comes with a scary label"?
    - lazide 3y ago
      No? Coal fires are pretty obvious. Acid rain is pretty obvious (and easy to measure with ph strips, which are easy to find). Nasty smog is pretty obvious. Plumes of gunk from smoke stacks are obvious. Now, co2 and fine particulate contamination (like say radioactive contamination from ash), yes. Those take decades to be noticable (if at all). There have been big issues because of it, statistically. But those are not well known/accepted either by the public. And certainly not the most common 'acute' problems. Something like a release of radiation from a nuclear power plant can (and usually is), completely invisible. As is things like ingesting fallout. It usually kills years or decades later. If you can see radiation, you're pretty much a dead man walking already. A reactor melting down is a sudden acute incident that can release massive amounts of completely invisible radioactive elements that won't kill anyone for decades - or in weeks/months, if really bad. By the time something has obviously gone wrong from the outside (like the core blowing up in Chernobyl, or the reactor building blowing up due to Hydrogen explosion in Fukushima), massive releases are essentially guaranteed. But still usually invisible. Cherenkov radiation 'sky beam' from chernobyl excepted. [https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1142309/Chernobyl-disaster-blue-beam-of-light-HBO-Chernobyl-real-nuclear-radiation https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1142309/Chernobyl-dis...] And with a little avoidance, a lethal dose might be easy to not have! If you have good data. Without good data, it's a crap shoot though.
- bumby 3y ago
  Humans are inherently bad at estimating risk when it comes to low probability events. The fact that there was an irrational response shouldn’t surprise anyone.

metabagel 3y ago

It was an uncomfortably close call. I believe it was a near meltdown. Could have gone a different way.

kalessin 3y ago
It was a partial meltdown in a pressurized water reactor, it cannot be compared to Chernobyl, it's a completely different technology. PWRs can't explode like what happened in Chernobyl.
- redprince 3y ago
  PWR is a "Pressurized Water Reactor" using (light) water under pressure as the primary coolant. The Chernobyl block #4 RBMK-1000 was certainly a PWR. While the precise mechanism by which the #4 reactor in Chernobyl was destroyed in 1986 was rooted in the flawed design combined with unsafe operation, this does not mean that other reactor designs cannot fail catastrophically with loss of containment and release of radioactive material. Particularly when operated outside of their specification through operator error, accidents or a combination thereof.
  - beefman 3y ago
    RBMK is not considered a PWR because it is graphite-moderated. Most reactors are classified first by their moderator. PWRs and BWRs are both LWRs, moderated by light water, as opposed to HWRs moderated by heavy water, or graphite-moderated reactors like RBMK, or fast reactors which have no moderator at all. Any reactor can fail and any can be operated safely. The reactivity coefficients of RBMK made it harder to control, perhaps, than a PWR. Modifications made after the Chernobyl accident have improved this. The main issue with Chernobyl 4 was its lack of a containment building. Even so, the response was an over-reaction that made the situation worse.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      RMBKs are an unsafe design. Chernobyl No. 4 was build in an unsafe manner and operated in an unsafe manner. Not sure which response to the accident was an over-reaction in your opinion so.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

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hef19898 3y ago

That is a pretty low bar to pass: success, our product failed but didn't injure or kill anyone unintentionally, nothing to see, move on.

avar 3y ago
It's a pretty high bar. Three mile island has a lifetime production of ~250 TWh, coal kills ~25 people per TWh. So if it had killed ~6000 people it would be within the accepted norms of the energy industry for anything that isn't nuclear. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
- natmaka 3y ago
  Nowadays this is not about "nuclear vs. coal" but "nuclear vs. renewables (which are way less deadly than coal)".
waveBidder 3y ago
Compared with the constant deaths from coal, yeah, it's a much better bet. Thankfully moot these days, but the overreaction to these problems set us back generations at solving climate change.

Retric 3y ago

It was a partial meltdown that cause 2 billion dollars in inflation adjusted damages. While it harmed the public perception of nuclear, it was really the cost that slowed down investments in US nuclear which then had knock on effects long term. The best way to think about it is power companies had other investments they could make that had less risks even if they had lower returns. Thus the cost is balanced not vs 0 returns but in comparison to the added benefit from nuclear. Fewer investments meant losing knowledge of how to build the things which further reduced nuclear’s advantages. Until today when nuclear just can’t compete successfully and anyone that tries sees vast cost overruns.

hef19898 3y ago
That's usually the point when capitalism evagelists start ignoring capitalism and economics, isn't it?

gosub100 3y ago

No one has mentioned yet (what I find to be) the most important fact: radioactive gases were vented in a populated area without any consent, review, or approval. (inb4 the nerdsniping about how and why it had to be done,it's irrelevant to my point). If you lived in the area, your community was exposed to radioactive substances, and thats where the incident really crossed the line and got people worried.