7 ms·

> Nuclear is very safe and reliable. How do we stop fukushima-like disasters?

by willvarfar 2y ago

stavros 2y ago
Mainly by not building reactors designed in the 1960s.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Better and more modern designs with sensible passive features and so on will solve a lot of the problems compared to these ancient plants.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    These more modern designs don't solve the primary problem of nuclear, which is cost.
    - mpweiher 2y ago
      That is not really the case. Nuclear power is extremely cost effective, even with the current plants. The individual plants are currently expensive, because they are large and produce huge amounts of power. Since that means you only have a fairly small number of plants, that means the risk is higher than preferable. However, even with existing designs, building a common design multiple times and overlapping the build times brings down risk, build-time and costs tremendously. The German Konvois were built for DM 5.8 billion in less than 6 years, and we were just getting started. China is currently building their version of the passively safe Westinghouse AP-1000, the CAP-1400, in 5 years for $ 3.5 billion.
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        Nuclear is being vastly outcompeted globally for new installations of power capacity by renewables. It's not even close. The only inference that can be drawn from this is that renewables beat nuclear in the market, that nuclear is the loser technology economically. Even in China, two orders of magnitude more PV comes online each year compared to nuclear (nameplate power, adjust by a factor of maybe 4 for levelized power). Nuclear advocates defending the fantasy you are espousing here have to resort to universal conspiracy theories to explain away this unpleasant reality. But how are supposedly omnipotent greens and public fear supposed to be hindering nuclear's rollout in China? Nuclear may benefit from experience, but that means that as rollouts are scaled back, experience decays away and nuclear gets more expensive. Below a certain (and probably pretty large) rate of installs, nuclear just regresses. It's not clear even China can avoid this at the current install rate.
        mpweiher 2y ago
        If that's the only inference you can draw from that, you're not paying attention. First, you need to compare actual output, not installed capacity. Once you take into account capacity factors, it's not looking so good any longer. Second, if it were true that nuclear is being "out-competed", then nobody in their right mind would expand their nuclear capacity. Yet almost everyone except a few crazies and countries that are too small are doing exactly that: expanding their nuclear capacity. Let's see who has decided to get into nuclear / reverse exits / expand capacity: 1. Italy just decided to reverse their exit. 2. Japan had decided to exit, and actually shut down their plants. They are now restarting those plants. 3. South Korea had also decided to exit, but not shut down any plants yet. They have reversed that exit. And are expanding. 4. Poland has decided to start a nuclear program, first 3 reactors are ordered, budgeted and construction has started at the site. There are a lot more planned. The vote for financing the new projects was nearly unanimous in parliament. 5. The UK is so incredibly unhappy with Hinkley Point C that they have just started work on 2 more reactors at Sizewell C, have sited another 2 in Wales and have a policy of expanding nuclear capacity by a factor of 4. 6. The US effectively built no new new plants since the TMI accident. They are now reactivating everything possible, are even planning to finish the two AP-1000s at Virgil C. Summer and have a goal of tripling their nuclear capacity by adding another 200 GW. 7. Sweden has reversed their exit and wants to build 10 new plants 8. The new government in Belgium has reversed their exit, has extended at least one (or was it two?) plant by another 10 years, is trying to save a few more that are/were due to be decommissioned and is looking to build more. 9. France had a ban on expanding their nuclear generating capacity beyond the currently installed capacity. This was lifted in March of 2023 with > 2/3 majority in parliament. 10. The Netherlands originally wanted two new nuclear reactors. They have now decided on 4 large reactors, in addition to the single small one they currently operate. This will be a 10x expansion of their nuclear capacity. 11. India is on track to triple their capacity by 2031. 12. China is currently starting 10 new reactors a year, and the rate is still increasing. Why aren't they doing more? Well, one reason is that nuclear power plants last for a really long time, currently estimated at least 80-100 years for most of the well-maintained plants. If you build 10 per year and they last 100 years, that implies a fleet of 1000 reactors. That's a lot of reactors! France made this mistake, they built around 50 reactors in only 15 years, due to vastly overestimating electricity demand. The result was that they the nuclear industry they built up had essentially no plants to build for a good number of decades, and so that know-how and capability was lost and had to be re-acquired at great cost (see Flamanville 3). Countries have learned from this and are pacing themselves. No need to rush. 13. The Czech Republic is betting on both large reactors from South Korea (the APR-1400, IIRC) as well as SMRs from Rolls Royce. In fact, they took a 20% in Rolls Royce. 14. Switzerland has begun the process of undoing their exit decision 15. Even Norway and Denmark are considering nuclear 16. The UAE, with ideal conditions for solar (desert), has recently completed a 4 reactor power plant, and is considering adding more. ... and so on and so forth ... Why are all these countries expanding nuclear? Is the entire rest of the world stupid? Crazy? Only Germany knows what they're doing? No. What they know is that a nuclear + renewable mix is significantly cheaper and more reliably than any attempt to do 100% intermittent renewables, even if that were feasible, which is more than uncertain. It is only (mostly?) in Germany where this crazy notion that nuclear and renewables are mutually exclusive has taken hold. They are not. They complement each other.
mrob 2y ago
By not ignoring studies that find risk of tsunami damage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident#Prior_warning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident#Pri...
- wahnfrieden 2y ago
  And how do you stop that? It’s like saying a kingdom is kept safe for its people by avoiding corrupt kings Your link shows a deeper root cause > TEPCO admitted that it had failed to take necessary measures for fear of inviting lawsuits or protests against its nuclear plants Scientific and engineering reports don’t solve that one
  - troupo 2y ago
    > Scientific and engineering reports don’t solve that one No tell me why we are still building hydroelectric plants? Hint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
jovial_cavalier 2y ago
The death toll from that incident was one (1). You can see online, nuclear power is actually one of the safest methods of energy generation, behind solar and ahead of wind, because sometimes dudes fall from the tops of the windmills. Could you start looking at the second-order effects of the meltdown to get a higher death toll? Probably, but you could probably also look at all of the pollutants generated by solar panels, and the fact that they get shipped to Africa and crushed up and thrown in the ground to make solar's death toll look higher too.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Death toll isn't the only metric for accident severity. Environmental pollution is really important too. And with Fukushima we were kinda lucky. It was still a double meltdown with several hydrogen explosions and could have been much worse.
  - jovial_cavalier 2y ago
    I think I already addressed this point. You also need to think about second-order effects, but like I said, there are second order effects to all of these solutions. Just because nuclear's side effects are more easy to dramatize doesn't mean that it is necessarily more deadly / harmful to the environment.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Death toll so far. Projections of cancer deaths from Fukushima go up into the hundreds.
  - mpweiher 2y ago
    That's not true. The WHO says there will be no detectable health effects.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      That's because the deaths would be lost in a sea of ordinary cancers. Hundreds of additional cancers would not be detectable; that would be below the statistical noise floor. Not being detectable does not mean they won't occur. Anyway, let me steelman what you're aiming at here. I think you want to argue not that hundreds of deaths won't occur, but that hundreds of deaths don't matter that much. These are statistical deaths, so it's appropriate to treat them using the "statistical value of a human life". This is the value of a life to be used for policy purposes (like deciding if a safety measure is needed, if spending on a medical treatment is appropriate, etc.) In the US, it's around $12M per life. So, 200 (say) deaths would have a value of $2.4B. This is not enormous compared to overall cost of the accident, even to the utility. It could be reasonable to treat radiation releases as at Fukushima by fining the polluter by an amount related to this value. Under this sort of regulatory regime, the purpose of regulations is not to avoid all releases, but to keep the releases small enough that the utilities would have the resources to pay the fines. So, no 100,000 death accidents. Nuclear power plants designed to this concept could allow some small radiation release in accidents.
klooney 2y ago
You can't. The problem with nuclear is that it needs to be properly maintained forever. If you get an irresponsible government or power company that cheaps out in 30 years, oopsies, you're going to irradiate the local area. It's a lot like trusting your private data to a company. Sure, Google in 2007 is pretty great, but maybe you have some doubts about their integrity in 2025. Too late, they have what they have, forever.
- philipov 2y ago
  Water-cooled reactors are the ones that are vulnerable to meltdown, but they're not the only way to do Nuclear.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  You can build systems to fail safe, so that lack of proper maintenance leads to the plant becoming safely inoperable, and only grossly-improper maintenance would cause a fallout incident. Is this guaranteed to work? The Chernobyl disaster was caused by grossly-improper maintenance, so… :shrug:. No matter how many physical safety mechanisms you have, a determined mechanic could remove them – but at that point, it becomes deliberate sabotage, which is rare, detectable, and not unique to nuclear power plants. (You could probably kill more people by destroying the right dam in the middle of the night.)
  - klooney 2y ago
    > grossly-improper maintenance would cause a fallout incident. At scale, in the long run, you will get grossly improper maintenance. I feel comfortable asserting that without feeling like a total cynic. It's not just nuclear either, this is also a problem with dams.
    - account42 2y ago
      ... and with every other energy source. The only difference is that some spread the damage out enough to the point where people stop caring vs. (somewhat) larger but incredibly rare incidents that make headlines. And that's before you take into account second order risks like people dying because they can't afford to heat properly during winter. The damage from Fukushima has been so small that it wouldn't make it past regional headlines if it didn't involve the scary word "nuclear".
raverbashing 2y ago
In the same way we have handled other dangerous activities (including aviation and driving around with sloshing flammable liquids) Improving continuously, having strict but not restrictive regulation, addressing risks before they become a problem.
- wahnfrieden 2y ago
  TEPCO decided to ignore regulations and reports on how they could improve and reduce risks. How do you solve corruption?
  - raverbashing 2y ago
    Aircraft can be grounded, so I'd say in some cases some more stringent enforcement is needed
IsTom 2y ago
Just don't build the plant next to Vesuvius. The biggest recorded earthquake in Europe was 7.1 magnitude, compared to 7.4 that caused tsunami that hit fukushima.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  The thing is, it's not the biggest earthquake in the past we have to worry about, it's the biggest one in the future. And climate change can have very sudden and unpredictable results too as we've seen all over the world in recent years.
  - IsTom 2y ago
    Europe just isn't a particularly seismically active and then only it's mostly southern Europe.
    - willvarfar 2y ago
      The article is about nuclear plants in Italy.
  - account42 2y ago
    Do you have any evidence to indicate that earthquakes could increase due to climate or is this just FUD.
    - willvarfar 2y ago
      The poster isn't saying they are related. The poster is listing two separate things.
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      No I didn't say that but extreme weather as a result of climate change is another major risk factor. Look at what happened here in Spain in Valencia only a few months ago. Unprecedented in the region's recorded history. Yet it keeps happening more and more. But I can see how the way I worded it suggests I meant that yes. I should have been clearer. What I did mean to say is that recorded history is like a microsecond in geological time and I wouldn't put too much confidence in predicting based on that short period. But they are two different risks. Over exacerbated by climate change, the other indeed not.
troupo 2y ago
How do we stop Banqiao Dam-like disasters?
N0isRESFe8GXmqR 2y ago
By building nuclear plants in places that won't get hit by tsunamis.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
[dead]
mrighele 2y ago
Accidents happen, you cannot eliminate completely the risk, but that is fine as long as you minimize the risk. People died because of wind power [1] but since the event is quite rare we don't ask ourselves "how do we stop wind-power-related disasters". In the case of Fukishima, only one person died directly because of it. About 2000 more deaths can be related to the nuclear accident, for example because they were displaced and living in worse conditions [2]. Since this is the kind of event that every few decades (we have to go back to Chernobyl for something similar) I would say that it is not a reason for worrying. For comparison, that is 1/10 of people that died in Japan because of the Tsunami that caused it, and it is less than the number of people that die every year for traffic accidents in Italy, so if I was Italian (wait, I am!) I would be more worried about the road traffic than a nuclear accident. [1] https://www.electricaltechnology.org/2024/07/two-engineers-hug-die-top-burning-wind-turbine.html https://www.electricaltechnology.org/2024/07/two-engineers-h... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
philipov 2y ago
Different types of reactors have less risk of meltdown. Look up Molten-Salt Reactors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUnik4gxrtM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUnik4gxrtM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor > MSRs eliminate the nuclear meltdown scenario present in water-cooled reactors because the fuel mixture is kept in a molten state. The fuel mixture is designed to drain without pumping from the core to a containment vessel in emergency scenarios, where the fuel solidifies, quenching the reaction.
surgical_fire 2y ago
How many people died at the Fukushima disaster? As one of the worst Nuclear accidents in history (caused by one of the largest earthquakes to hit Japan along with a tsunami), an awfully small amount of people died. If anything, Fukushima shows how safe Nuclear actually is.
hoseja 2y ago
There was no nuclear disaster at Fukushima. There was a tsunami and there was a destruction of a nuclear power plant. There were a couple cancers and an undetectable release of tritiated water into the Pacific Freaking Ocean.
account42 2y ago
A minor concern compared to pollution from other energy sources, including "renewable" ones once you include all materials needed.

> Nuclear is very safe and reliable. How do we stop fukushima-like disasters?

stavros 2y ago

Mainly by not building reactors designed in the 1960s.

Ekaros 2y ago
Better and more modern designs with sensible passive features and so on will solve a lot of the problems compared to these ancient plants.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  These more modern designs don't solve the primary problem of nuclear, which is cost.
  - mpweiher 2y ago
    That is not really the case. Nuclear power is extremely cost effective, even with the current plants. The individual plants are currently expensive, because they are large and produce huge amounts of power. Since that means you only have a fairly small number of plants, that means the risk is higher than preferable. However, even with existing designs, building a common design multiple times and overlapping the build times brings down risk, build-time and costs tremendously. The German Konvois were built for DM 5.8 billion in less than 6 years, and we were just getting started. China is currently building their version of the passively safe Westinghouse AP-1000, the CAP-1400, in 5 years for $ 3.5 billion.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      Nuclear is being vastly outcompeted globally for new installations of power capacity by renewables. It's not even close. The only inference that can be drawn from this is that renewables beat nuclear in the market, that nuclear is the loser technology economically. Even in China, two orders of magnitude more PV comes online each year compared to nuclear (nameplate power, adjust by a factor of maybe 4 for levelized power). Nuclear advocates defending the fantasy you are espousing here have to resort to universal conspiracy theories to explain away this unpleasant reality. But how are supposedly omnipotent greens and public fear supposed to be hindering nuclear's rollout in China? Nuclear may benefit from experience, but that means that as rollouts are scaled back, experience decays away and nuclear gets more expensive. Below a certain (and probably pretty large) rate of installs, nuclear just regresses. It's not clear even China can avoid this at the current install rate.
      - mpweiher 2y ago
        If that's the only inference you can draw from that, you're not paying attention. First, you need to compare actual output, not installed capacity. Once you take into account capacity factors, it's not looking so good any longer. Second, if it were true that nuclear is being "out-competed", then nobody in their right mind would expand their nuclear capacity. Yet almost everyone except a few crazies and countries that are too small are doing exactly that: expanding their nuclear capacity. Let's see who has decided to get into nuclear / reverse exits / expand capacity: 1. Italy just decided to reverse their exit. 2. Japan had decided to exit, and actually shut down their plants. They are now restarting those plants. 3. South Korea had also decided to exit, but not shut down any plants yet. They have reversed that exit. And are expanding. 4. Poland has decided to start a nuclear program, first 3 reactors are ordered, budgeted and construction has started at the site. There are a lot more planned. The vote for financing the new projects was nearly unanimous in parliament. 5. The UK is so incredibly unhappy with Hinkley Point C that they have just started work on 2 more reactors at Sizewell C, have sited another 2 in Wales and have a policy of expanding nuclear capacity by a factor of 4. 6. The US effectively built no new new plants since the TMI accident. They are now reactivating everything possible, are even planning to finish the two AP-1000s at Virgil C. Summer and have a goal of tripling their nuclear capacity by adding another 200 GW. 7. Sweden has reversed their exit and wants to build 10 new plants 8. The new government in Belgium has reversed their exit, has extended at least one (or was it two?) plant by another 10 years, is trying to save a few more that are/were due to be decommissioned and is looking to build more. 9. France had a ban on expanding their nuclear generating capacity beyond the currently installed capacity. This was lifted in March of 2023 with > 2/3 majority in parliament. 10. The Netherlands originally wanted two new nuclear reactors. They have now decided on 4 large reactors, in addition to the single small one they currently operate. This will be a 10x expansion of their nuclear capacity. 11. India is on track to triple their capacity by 2031. 12. China is currently starting 10 new reactors a year, and the rate is still increasing. Why aren't they doing more? Well, one reason is that nuclear power plants last for a really long time, currently estimated at least 80-100 years for most of the well-maintained plants. If you build 10 per year and they last 100 years, that implies a fleet of 1000 reactors. That's a lot of reactors! France made this mistake, they built around 50 reactors in only 15 years, due to vastly overestimating electricity demand. The result was that they the nuclear industry they built up had essentially no plants to build for a good number of decades, and so that know-how and capability was lost and had to be re-acquired at great cost (see Flamanville 3). Countries have learned from this and are pacing themselves. No need to rush. 13. The Czech Republic is betting on both large reactors from South Korea (the APR-1400, IIRC) as well as SMRs from Rolls Royce. In fact, they took a 20% in Rolls Royce. 14. Switzerland has begun the process of undoing their exit decision 15. Even Norway and Denmark are considering nuclear 16. The UAE, with ideal conditions for solar (desert), has recently completed a 4 reactor power plant, and is considering adding more. ... and so on and so forth ... Why are all these countries expanding nuclear? Is the entire rest of the world stupid? Crazy? Only Germany knows what they're doing? No. What they know is that a nuclear + renewable mix is significantly cheaper and more reliably than any attempt to do 100% intermittent renewables, even if that were feasible, which is more than uncertain. It is only (mostly?) in Germany where this crazy notion that nuclear and renewables are mutually exclusive has taken hold. They are not. They complement each other.

mrob 2y ago

By not ignoring studies that find risk of tsunami damage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident#Prior_warning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident#Pri...

wahnfrieden 2y ago
And how do you stop that? It’s like saying a kingdom is kept safe for its people by avoiding corrupt kings Your link shows a deeper root cause > TEPCO admitted that it had failed to take necessary measures for fear of inviting lawsuits or protests against its nuclear plants Scientific and engineering reports don’t solve that one
- troupo 2y ago
  > Scientific and engineering reports don’t solve that one No tell me why we are still building hydroelectric plants? Hint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

jovial_cavalier 2y ago

The death toll from that incident was one (1). You can see online, nuclear power is actually one of the safest methods of energy generation, behind solar and ahead of wind, because sometimes dudes fall from the tops of the windmills. Could you start looking at the second-order effects of the meltdown to get a higher death toll? Probably, but you could probably also look at all of the pollutants generated by solar panels, and the fact that they get shipped to Africa and crushed up and thrown in the ground to make solar's death toll look higher too.

wkat4242 2y ago
Death toll isn't the only metric for accident severity. Environmental pollution is really important too. And with Fukushima we were kinda lucky. It was still a double meltdown with several hydrogen explosions and could have been much worse.
- jovial_cavalier 2y ago
  I think I already addressed this point. You also need to think about second-order effects, but like I said, there are second order effects to all of these solutions. Just because nuclear's side effects are more easy to dramatize doesn't mean that it is necessarily more deadly / harmful to the environment.
pfdietz 2y ago
Death toll so far. Projections of cancer deaths from Fukushima go up into the hundreds.
- mpweiher 2y ago
  That's not true. The WHO says there will be no detectable health effects.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    That's because the deaths would be lost in a sea of ordinary cancers. Hundreds of additional cancers would not be detectable; that would be below the statistical noise floor. Not being detectable does not mean they won't occur. Anyway, let me steelman what you're aiming at here. I think you want to argue not that hundreds of deaths won't occur, but that hundreds of deaths don't matter that much. These are statistical deaths, so it's appropriate to treat them using the "statistical value of a human life". This is the value of a life to be used for policy purposes (like deciding if a safety measure is needed, if spending on a medical treatment is appropriate, etc.) In the US, it's around $12M per life. So, 200 (say) deaths would have a value of $2.4B. This is not enormous compared to overall cost of the accident, even to the utility. It could be reasonable to treat radiation releases as at Fukushima by fining the polluter by an amount related to this value. Under this sort of regulatory regime, the purpose of regulations is not to avoid all releases, but to keep the releases small enough that the utilities would have the resources to pay the fines. So, no 100,000 death accidents. Nuclear power plants designed to this concept could allow some small radiation release in accidents.

klooney 2y ago

You can't. The problem with nuclear is that it needs to be properly maintained forever. If you get an irresponsible government or power company that cheaps out in 30 years, oopsies, you're going to irradiate the local area. It's a lot like trusting your private data to a company. Sure, Google in 2007 is pretty great, but maybe you have some doubts about their integrity in 2025. Too late, they have what they have, forever.

philipov 2y ago
Water-cooled reactors are the ones that are vulnerable to meltdown, but they're not the only way to do Nuclear.
wizzwizz4 2y ago
You can build systems to fail safe, so that lack of proper maintenance leads to the plant becoming safely inoperable, and only grossly-improper maintenance would cause a fallout incident. Is this guaranteed to work? The Chernobyl disaster was caused by grossly-improper maintenance, so… :shrug:. No matter how many physical safety mechanisms you have, a determined mechanic could remove them – but at that point, it becomes deliberate sabotage, which is rare, detectable, and not unique to nuclear power plants. (You could probably kill more people by destroying the right dam in the middle of the night.)
- klooney 2y ago
  > grossly-improper maintenance would cause a fallout incident. At scale, in the long run, you will get grossly improper maintenance. I feel comfortable asserting that without feeling like a total cynic. It's not just nuclear either, this is also a problem with dams.
  - account42 2y ago
    ... and with every other energy source. The only difference is that some spread the damage out enough to the point where people stop caring vs. (somewhat) larger but incredibly rare incidents that make headlines. And that's before you take into account second order risks like people dying because they can't afford to heat properly during winter. The damage from Fukushima has been so small that it wouldn't make it past regional headlines if it didn't involve the scary word "nuclear".

raverbashing 2y ago

In the same way we have handled other dangerous activities (including aviation and driving around with sloshing flammable liquids) Improving continuously, having strict but not restrictive regulation, addressing risks before they become a problem.

wahnfrieden 2y ago
TEPCO decided to ignore regulations and reports on how they could improve and reduce risks. How do you solve corruption?
- raverbashing 2y ago
  Aircraft can be grounded, so I'd say in some cases some more stringent enforcement is needed

IsTom 2y ago

Just don't build the plant next to Vesuvius. The biggest recorded earthquake in Europe was 7.1 magnitude, compared to 7.4 that caused tsunami that hit fukushima.

wkat4242 2y ago
The thing is, it's not the biggest earthquake in the past we have to worry about, it's the biggest one in the future. And climate change can have very sudden and unpredictable results too as we've seen all over the world in recent years.
- IsTom 2y ago
  Europe just isn't a particularly seismically active and then only it's mostly southern Europe.
  - willvarfar 2y ago
    The article is about nuclear plants in Italy.
- account42 2y ago
  Do you have any evidence to indicate that earthquakes could increase due to climate or is this just FUD.
  - willvarfar 2y ago
    The poster isn't saying they are related. The poster is listing two separate things.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    No I didn't say that but extreme weather as a result of climate change is another major risk factor. Look at what happened here in Spain in Valencia only a few months ago. Unprecedented in the region's recorded history. Yet it keeps happening more and more. But I can see how the way I worded it suggests I meant that yes. I should have been clearer. What I did mean to say is that recorded history is like a microsecond in geological time and I wouldn't put too much confidence in predicting based on that short period. But they are two different risks. Over exacerbated by climate change, the other indeed not.

troupo 2y ago

How do we stop Banqiao Dam-like disasters?

N0isRESFe8GXmqR 2y ago

By building nuclear plants in places that won't get hit by tsunamis.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

[dead]

mrighele 2y ago

Accidents happen, you cannot eliminate completely the risk, but that is fine as long as you minimize the risk. People died because of wind power [1] but since the event is quite rare we don't ask ourselves "how do we stop wind-power-related disasters". In the case of Fukishima, only one person died directly because of it. About 2000 more deaths can be related to the nuclear accident, for example because they were displaced and living in worse conditions [2]. Since this is the kind of event that every few decades (we have to go back to Chernobyl for something similar) I would say that it is not a reason for worrying. For comparison, that is 1/10 of people that died in Japan because of the Tsunami that caused it, and it is less than the number of people that die every year for traffic accidents in Italy, so if I was Italian (wait, I am!) I would be more worried about the road traffic than a nuclear accident. [1] https://www.electricaltechnology.org/2024/07/two-engineers-hug-die-top-burning-wind-turbine.html https://www.electricaltechnology.org/2024/07/two-engineers-h... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...

philipov 2y ago

Different types of reactors have less risk of meltdown. Look up Molten-Salt Reactors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUnik4gxrtM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUnik4gxrtM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor > MSRs eliminate the nuclear meltdown scenario present in water-cooled reactors because the fuel mixture is kept in a molten state. The fuel mixture is designed to drain without pumping from the core to a containment vessel in emergency scenarios, where the fuel solidifies, quenching the reaction.

surgical_fire 2y ago

How many people died at the Fukushima disaster? As one of the worst Nuclear accidents in history (caused by one of the largest earthquakes to hit Japan along with a tsunami), an awfully small amount of people died. If anything, Fukushima shows how safe Nuclear actually is.

hoseja 2y ago

There was no nuclear disaster at Fukushima. There was a tsunami and there was a destruction of a nuclear power plant. There were a couple cancers and an undetectable release of tritiated water into the Pacific Freaking Ocean.

account42 2y ago

A minor concern compared to pollution from other energy sources, including "renewable" ones once you include all materials needed.