4 ms·

Considering the potential damage, nuclear is right up there with aviation, medical and life science when it comes to safety standards. Because each and every in

by hef19898 3y ago

Considering the potential damage, nuclear is right up there with aviation, medical and life science when it comes to safety standards. Because each and every incident can be traced back to ignoring whatever safety standards and practices where applicable at the time these accidents happened. Someone would have to pay for those 1000 NPPs, and in the current market conditions no one is willing to, because the ROI isn't there. Even you said so, there is no NPP standard in place to begin with, so before those 1000 plants are ordered, this standard design has to defined, agreed upon and developed first. And that takes how long in your opinion?

pas 3y ago
Yes, and the safety conscious approach is great, and aviation and medicine are a pretty good examples, they can be safe and cheap at the same time. (Notwithstanding the usual [and rightful!] grumbling about the FDA, and the Boeing/FAA MCAS fuckup.) The ROI is not there because other forms of electricity generation didn't have to pay for most of their externalities[1], and people don't give a damn about actual safety profile, or mid-long term overall costs, it's simply the usual sentimentalism-theater. > Oh think of the nuclear waste, oh think of the poor little spent fuel rods leaking into our puppies' drinking water, oh think of all the horrible unspeakable tragedies we will get when every Monday Chernobyl repeats but worse, Fridays are for Fukushimas, and the rest of the weekdays are for all the usual GreenPeace-made-up dangers. But of course instead currently, of course, we enjoy the peaceful and prosperous energy abundance granted to us by ... checks notes ... the same geniuses who delivered the just one-more-lane will solve the traffic jams for sure hit comedy series, the single-family house exclusive rated 10/10 absolute heavens on Earth[2], healthcare as an investment [3], but muh guns [4], and so on. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy [2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Largo,+FL,+USA/@27.9213946,-82.7848613,180a,35y,39.5t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x88c2f1a682630e5b:0x61bf2ea662c55d45!8m2!3d27.9094665!4d-82.7873244!16zL20vMHJyMWY?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/place/Largo,+FL,+USA/@27.9213946... whatever the hell is going on here :o [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38773426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38773426 private equity takeover is amazing for hospitals(' profitabilty) [4] https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2017/special-report/unlocked-loaded/stolen-guns/ https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2017/special-report/u... muh guns and muh freedum to leave guns in not-even-locked cars to get stolen
- hef19898 3y ago
  What are you even talking about? and what have guns to do with any of that? Or Greenpeace? After all, it is a well known fact that NPPs are uninsureable, always have been. Because insurance compabies are extremely good at running risk-premium-profit models, and those all tell the same thing: don't offer insurance for NPPs above very small amounts that are nowhere near enough to cover a serious accident.
  - pas 3y ago
    I'm talking about the usual failure of policy-through-populism. Nuclear energy is in the same category as those I mentioned. Uninsurable at what price? If NPPs work without insurance, maybe it's irrelevant anyway. (Especially since private parties hardly can just run their own NPPs, and states already run them or allow them to be run without insurance.) That said I don't know whether residents near NPPs have a higher preimum because of the plant. Or even whether they can get policies from insurers. But if they can, then insurance already does underwrite some of the costs of potential accidents.
aftbit 3y ago
>Because each and every incident can be traced back to ignoring whatever safety standards and practices where applicable at the time these accidents happened. No they absolutely cannot. Many incidents happened due to yet unimagined failures. For example, KLM Flight 867, which lost all four engines due to a common mode failure (flying through ash clouds). The plane landed safely and safety standards were updated to provide guidance on avoiding, detecting, and reacting to ash ingestion. TMI was a similar situation. At that point, nobody had really considered human factors engineering for nuclear plants. Nobody considered the risk of having a lamp that indicated that a valve had been asked to close instead of that it actually was closed. One major challenge that aviation has handled better than nuclear and much better than chemical production is ensuring that issues get reported promptly and treated seriously. Aviation calls it "just culture", where mistakes and accidents are treated with retraining and lenience, but covering up issues is treated very harshly. This is absolutely necessary, otherwise you end up with major communications issues like we saw with MetEd during TMI or Tepco during Fukishima.
- hef19898 3y ago
  I ment nuclear accidents and disasters, both Chernobyl and Fukushima can be traced back to ignoring safety rules and regulations.
  - aftbit 3y ago
    Ah I see. Let me write up a few thoughts about the "big 3" nuclear accidents. Chernobyl was a very poor design, with a positive void coefficient of reactivity (i.e. temperature goes up, steam goes up, reactivity goes up, leading to runaway feedback) and no containment building. It was operated in a very poor manner as well, which was the principle cause of the failure. Some sources[1] claim that this poor design and unsafe operating conditions were well known to plant management and Soviet leadership, and were covered up in the name of Progress and production pressures. There was even a very similar accident that occurred during a very similar test in Leningrad in 1975, albeit with less extreme consequences, which was fully covered up, even from plant operators at other RBMK reactors.[2] Fukushima was a pretty well designed and operated reactor, but the design basis did not consider the risk of a large tsunami, rather instead focusing on typhoons. Ironically, they actually removed a larger "natural sea wall" (i.e. a cliff) that would have protected the plant.[3] The big lesson learned here is to have prepositioned stocks of generators, batteries, replacement parts, etc close enough to the plant to be supplied promptly as needed, but far enough away to hopefully be excluded from any local disasters, aka the FLEX program.[4] On the other hand, TMI was an accident in which the operators made the wrong call, primarily because they had been trained to be concerned about one specific danger ("going solid" and bursting the pressurizer, requiring less water injection), but really they were facing a totally different one (small break loss of cooling, requiring more high pressure water injection).[5] Interestingly, a very similar accident happened at Davis Besse in Ohio only a few years before, but without any major consequences, as the operations team recognized the mistake and resolved it, but these lessons learned were not well communicated to operators of other plants. This failure and others like it led to the establishment of WANO (international) and INPO (USA) which are organizations intended to help operators share experiences with each other in a timely and safe manner.[6][7] 1: https://www.reuters.com/world/unsealed-soviet-archives-reveal-cover-ups-chernobyl-plant-before-disaster-2021-04-26/ https://www.reuters.com/world/unsealed-soviet-archives-revea... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_Nuclear_Power_Plant 3: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Tepco-Removed-Natural-Seawall-that-Would-Have-Protected-Daiichi-Facility.html https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Tepco-Rem... 4: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1524/ML15244B006.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1524/ML15244B006.pdf 5: 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... 6: https://www.wano.info/services/overview-of-services-(1) https://www.wano.info/services/overview-of-services-(1) 7: https://www.inpo.info/history https://www.inpo.info/history
midasuni 3y ago
Potential damage is one thing, but for actual deaths coal is 1000 times more deadly per TWh than nuclear, so surely coal requires far more rigourous safety standards https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
- hef19898 3y ago
  It would never occur to me to defend coal...
- cinntaile 3y ago
  You need to look at the potential consequences of an accident to determine how rigorous the safety standards should be. A metric such as deaths/TWh cannot answer that question and therefore should not be used to guide the answer.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    You have to weigh the likelihood of potential harm. The liklihood of harm from the co2 pumped out by continued fossil fuel is far higher than some magical never before happened scenario
    - cinntaile 3y ago
      We're no longer talking about how rigorous the safety standards should be. Your claim was that deaths/TWh is a good metric to determine this, I disagreed and replied to that.
      - midasuni 3y ago
        Deaths per twh shows just how safe nuclear is compared with other fuels, yet nuclear is the one overburdened with more safety requirements.
        pas 3y ago

pas 3y ago

Yes, and the safety conscious approach is great, and aviation and medicine are a pretty good examples, they can be safe and cheap at the same time. (Notwithstanding the usual [and rightful!] grumbling about the FDA, and the Boeing/FAA MCAS fuckup.) The ROI is not there because other forms of electricity generation didn't have to pay for most of their externalities[1], and people don't give a damn about actual safety profile, or mid-long term overall costs, it's simply the usual sentimentalism-theater. > Oh think of the nuclear waste, oh think of the poor little spent fuel rods leaking into our puppies' drinking water, oh think of all the horrible unspeakable tragedies we will get when every Monday Chernobyl repeats but worse, Fridays are for Fukushimas, and the rest of the weekdays are for all the usual GreenPeace-made-up dangers. But of course instead currently, of course, we enjoy the peaceful and prosperous energy abundance granted to us by ... checks notes ... the same geniuses who delivered the just one-more-lane will solve the traffic jams for sure hit comedy series, the single-family house exclusive rated 10/10 absolute heavens on Earth[2], healthcare as an investment [3], but muh guns [4], and so on. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy [2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Largo,+FL,+USA/@27.9213946,-82.7848613,180a,35y,39.5t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x88c2f1a682630e5b:0x61bf2ea662c55d45!8m2!3d27.9094665!4d-82.7873244!16zL20vMHJyMWY?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/place/Largo,+FL,+USA/@27.9213946... whatever the hell is going on here :o [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38773426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38773426 private equity takeover is amazing for hospitals(' profitabilty) [4] https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2017/special-report/unlocked-loaded/stolen-guns/ https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2017/special-report/u... muh guns and muh freedum to leave guns in not-even-locked cars to get stolen

hef19898 3y ago
What are you even talking about? and what have guns to do with any of that? Or Greenpeace? After all, it is a well known fact that NPPs are uninsureable, always have been. Because insurance compabies are extremely good at running risk-premium-profit models, and those all tell the same thing: don't offer insurance for NPPs above very small amounts that are nowhere near enough to cover a serious accident.
- pas 3y ago
  I'm talking about the usual failure of policy-through-populism. Nuclear energy is in the same category as those I mentioned. Uninsurable at what price? If NPPs work without insurance, maybe it's irrelevant anyway. (Especially since private parties hardly can just run their own NPPs, and states already run them or allow them to be run without insurance.) That said I don't know whether residents near NPPs have a higher preimum because of the plant. Or even whether they can get policies from insurers. But if they can, then insurance already does underwrite some of the costs of potential accidents.

aftbit 3y ago

>Because each and every incident can be traced back to ignoring whatever safety standards and practices where applicable at the time these accidents happened. No they absolutely cannot. Many incidents happened due to yet unimagined failures. For example, KLM Flight 867, which lost all four engines due to a common mode failure (flying through ash clouds). The plane landed safely and safety standards were updated to provide guidance on avoiding, detecting, and reacting to ash ingestion. TMI was a similar situation. At that point, nobody had really considered human factors engineering for nuclear plants. Nobody considered the risk of having a lamp that indicated that a valve had been asked to close instead of that it actually was closed. One major challenge that aviation has handled better than nuclear and much better than chemical production is ensuring that issues get reported promptly and treated seriously. Aviation calls it "just culture", where mistakes and accidents are treated with retraining and lenience, but covering up issues is treated very harshly. This is absolutely necessary, otherwise you end up with major communications issues like we saw with MetEd during TMI or Tepco during Fukishima.

hef19898 3y ago
I ment nuclear accidents and disasters, both Chernobyl and Fukushima can be traced back to ignoring safety rules and regulations.
- aftbit 3y ago
  Ah I see. Let me write up a few thoughts about the "big 3" nuclear accidents. Chernobyl was a very poor design, with a positive void coefficient of reactivity (i.e. temperature goes up, steam goes up, reactivity goes up, leading to runaway feedback) and no containment building. It was operated in a very poor manner as well, which was the principle cause of the failure. Some sources[1] claim that this poor design and unsafe operating conditions were well known to plant management and Soviet leadership, and were covered up in the name of Progress and production pressures. There was even a very similar accident that occurred during a very similar test in Leningrad in 1975, albeit with less extreme consequences, which was fully covered up, even from plant operators at other RBMK reactors.[2] Fukushima was a pretty well designed and operated reactor, but the design basis did not consider the risk of a large tsunami, rather instead focusing on typhoons. Ironically, they actually removed a larger "natural sea wall" (i.e. a cliff) that would have protected the plant.[3] The big lesson learned here is to have prepositioned stocks of generators, batteries, replacement parts, etc close enough to the plant to be supplied promptly as needed, but far enough away to hopefully be excluded from any local disasters, aka the FLEX program.[4] On the other hand, TMI was an accident in which the operators made the wrong call, primarily because they had been trained to be concerned about one specific danger ("going solid" and bursting the pressurizer, requiring less water injection), but really they were facing a totally different one (small break loss of cooling, requiring more high pressure water injection).[5] Interestingly, a very similar accident happened at Davis Besse in Ohio only a few years before, but without any major consequences, as the operations team recognized the mistake and resolved it, but these lessons learned were not well communicated to operators of other plants. This failure and others like it led to the establishment of WANO (international) and INPO (USA) which are organizations intended to help operators share experiences with each other in a timely and safe manner.[6][7] 1: https://www.reuters.com/world/unsealed-soviet-archives-reveal-cover-ups-chernobyl-plant-before-disaster-2021-04-26/ https://www.reuters.com/world/unsealed-soviet-archives-revea... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_Nuclear_Power_Plant 3: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Tepco-Removed-Natural-Seawall-that-Would-Have-Protected-Daiichi-Facility.html https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Tepco-Rem... 4: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1524/ML15244B006.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1524/ML15244B006.pdf 5: 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... 6: https://www.wano.info/services/overview-of-services-(1) https://www.wano.info/services/overview-of-services-(1) 7: https://www.inpo.info/history https://www.inpo.info/history

midasuni 3y ago

Potential damage is one thing, but for actual deaths coal is 1000 times more deadly per TWh than nuclear, so surely coal requires far more rigourous safety standards https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

hef19898 3y ago
It would never occur to me to defend coal...
cinntaile 3y ago
You need to look at the potential consequences of an accident to determine how rigorous the safety standards should be. A metric such as deaths/TWh cannot answer that question and therefore should not be used to guide the answer.
- midasuni 3y ago
  You have to weigh the likelihood of potential harm. The liklihood of harm from the co2 pumped out by continued fossil fuel is far higher than some magical never before happened scenario
  - cinntaile 3y ago
    We're no longer talking about how rigorous the safety standards should be. Your claim was that deaths/TWh is a good metric to determine this, I disagreed and replied to that.
    - midasuni 3y ago
      Deaths per twh shows just how safe nuclear is compared with other fuels, yet nuclear is the one overburdened with more safety requirements.
      - pas 3y ago